Our narrator is taking his eighteen year old daughter to the airport where she is flying to Spain to join her boyfriend for a pre-college trip. He is also caring for his aging parents. This would be the circumstance my son finds himself in and I read the story with him in mind. Our narrator is suffering physical symptoms brought on by this double whammy. He has a wife, but she is doing important work so a lot of the everyday stuff falls on him. Also she is more at ease with life moving on than he is. A good story. I will look for more from Matthew Klam.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/hi-daddy-fiction-matthew-klam
6 comments:
This does sound like a good setup for a story, Patti, and there are a lot of people in that life situation.
Don't know him, but it sounds an interesting story.
Currently reading the latest Ed Hoch collection, The Will-o'-the-Wisp Mystery. In 1971, he did 6 interconnected stories in EQMM, one a month, published as by "Mr. X." A prison escape leaves six criminals - some of them are murderers - free, and David Piper, "The Manhunter" of the Department of Apprehension, has to track them down. The second half of the book consists of the seven stories about Father David Noone, a Roman Catholic priest. They were published over a 40 year period.
I finally got the last of the collected Philip K. Dick story collections from the library - after waiting literally months, TWO copies came at once. This is The Minority Report, stories dated between 1954 and 1964.
Jeff, you'll enjoy THE WILL-O'-THE-WISP MYSTERY. I've read several of Philip K. Dick's collections. PKD was brilliant...but uneven.
Yes, Dick was basically a chameleon at the beginning of his career--writing a lot of stories to the assumed (often correctly) prejudices of the editors in question...which didn't stop him from writing brilliantly when moved to do so. "Upon the Dull Earth" always comes to mind among the less well-remembered brilliant examples.
This sounds like a good story and I will find it at the New Yorker.
Thanks, Patti, for the reviews of the NY stories...I see they've found a way to foil the paywall-piercer Archive.ph, so I'll have to actually do some kind of sub again to read them.
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