[{"id":275134,"date":"2026-08-11T05:09:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T09:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275134"},"modified":"2026-08-03T21:56:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T01:56:28","slug":"to-write-as-if-no-one-will-see-what-youve-written-why-the-short-story-wont-go-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/to-write-as-if-no-one-will-see-what-youve-written-why-the-short-story-wont-go-away\/","title":{"rendered":"To Write As If No One Will See What You\u2019ve Written: Why the Short Story Won\u2019t Go Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every so often\u2014sometimes in October, when the annual Best American Short Stories<\/i> anthology is published, or on the infrequent occasions when an iconic short story writer like George Saunders, Alice Munro, or Lydia Davis wins a major award\u2014an article appears asking a perennial question. As The Guardian <\/i>put it in 2018<\/a>: \u201cWhat is a short story? Why should we read them?\u201d<\/p>\n

I find these articles amusing and also sad. They repeat a kind of ritual, not unlike the rituals you\u2019ll find in some of the most famous short stories, like Shirley Jackson\u2019s \u201cThe Lottery\u201d and Kafka\u2019s \u201cA Hunger Artist.\u201d A troubling object, or troubling person (or, in this case, a troubling genre) is put on display where we can see it and consider what to do with it. What is the problem with this thing? Why does it not fit? It arouses strange feelings in us\u2014pity, guilt, instinctual dislike, fidgety disapproval. Wouldn\u2019t it be easier just to get rid of it, dismiss it, smother it?<\/p>\n

One theory I have about the supposed public dislike of short stories is that people associate them with middle school English\u2014you\u2019re already dealing with warm cafeteria milk, training bras, a bit of lettuce caught in your braces, and then the teacher hands you a smudged copy of \u201cThe Lottery\u201d or \u201cThe Gift of the Magi\u201d or \u201cThe Telltale Heart\u201d and tells you to answer five questions about it by Monday. Nobody likes homework. Nobody associates it with pleasure.<\/p>\n

The short story\u2019s subversive power is inversely correlated to its popularity, even to its academic credibility.<\/p>\n

Short stories, like middle schoolers, are an awkward size. They don\u2019t fit easily in today\u2019s media landscape. Unlike personal essays and even poetry, they\u2019ve have never found a home on the Internet, despite many valiant attempts\u2014short story websites, podcasts, email newsletters, none of which have found much of an audience. There was a brief flash of hope when Kristen Roupenian\u2019s \u201cCat Person\u201d went viral in 2017<\/a>, but that was nearly a decade ago, and, like many things in our day and age, what could have been a trend was merely a moment.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t seem fair, does it? Since you can read a short story in one sitting\u2014that\u2019s how Poe defined the short story in his essay \u201cThe Philosophy of Composition\u201d\u2014shouldn\u2019t that make people more<\/i> eager to consume them, like Modern Love<\/i> columns or Gossip Girl <\/i>rewatch podcasts?<\/p>\n

In truth, short stories demand intense concentration, sometimes even a suspension of the normal rules of language, for a short period of time. It\u2019s hard to read one of them after another. It\u2019s hard to read them on your phone. They\u2019re not\u2014I think of this as a key problem\u2014relaxing. Of course, there are short stories that operate in all different levels of emotional intensity, but it\u2019s easy to understand why readers don\u2019t want to over-commit their attention. No one likes short films either, although if you happen to live near an art house theater that plays them, you\u2019ll be astonished at how good they are.<\/p>\n

If you look around at the way ordinary people actually consume narrative content these days, counter-intuitively, they like things relatively long. TV shows more than standalone feature films. Franchises, like Dune<\/i> or Spiderman<\/i>. Fantasy series that run into thousands of pages. Quantity, sheer mass, always seems to win out over intensity.<\/p>\n

Strangely this also applies to scholars of fiction, the very people you\u2019d think would take stories the most seriously. Outside of creative writing programs, very few literature professors teach classes on the short story, or write books about them. They study novels\u2014and only novels, as if shorter forms of fiction don\u2019t exist. Years ago I tried to convince W.W. Norton\u2014publisher of literary anthologies and textbooks on every conceivable subject\u2014to publish the first-ever anthology of short story theory and criticism and was told, \u201cThere\u2019s no audience for a book like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, to me, signals the most important thing about short stories: even people who ought to know better are ashamed to be associated with them. The short story\u2019s subversive power is inversely correlated to its popularity, even to its academic credibility.<\/p>\n

If you think about great short story writers from the genre\u2019s short history, this begins to make sense. They\u2019re famous now, but while they were alive, writers like Poe, Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Heinrich von Kleist, Isaac Babel, Jane Bowles, Lu Xun, didn\u2019t win any popularity contests, to put it mildly. In some cases it\u2019s a miracle their work survived at all. Two of the greatest short story writers in my own personal pantheon, Bruno Schulz and Henry Dumas, were murdered by hostile governments in the prime of life\u2014Schulz by a Nazi commander in 1942, Dumas by the NYPD in 1968\u2014and were only rescued posthumously from total anonymity.<\/p>\n

Short story writers, in other words, are exactly what artists are supposed to be: Clear-eyed, realistic, fiercely independent, and at peace with their place at the margins of a culture that only occasionally, unpredictably, looks their way. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s for this reason that I always tell my students they should embrace the short story\u2019s obscurity, not for its own sake, but because it\u2019s a platform on which you can build almost anything. You could publish the nation\u2019s nuclear codes in a short story and it might take months for anyone to notice. You could\u2014as I did last year\u2014tell the story of how Henry Kissinger was secretly assassinated<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Short stories should be like that: wild, irresponsible, arrogant, defiant. When I asked some friends in the fiction business why they persist in writing short stories instead of (or in addition to) novels, Nicholas Montemarano summed up my thoughts more or less word for word: \u201cThere\u2019s something freeing about writing in genres that the culture at large doesn’t value much,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTo write as if no one will ever see what you’ve written.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rion Amilcar Scott echoed the same antagonistic streak: \u201cI want to keep making the stubborn, perhaps erroneous, argument that a single story can be as powerful as a novel,\u201d he said, echoing Borges\u2019 famous (and perhaps apocryphal) line that the short story makes novels irrelevant. Manuel Mu\u00f1oz, who won a MacArthur \u201cGenius\u201d Award in 2023 for his short stories set in the Mexican-American communities of California\u2019s Central Valley, told me, \u201cGiven who\/where\/what I write about, I was always realistic and clear-eyed about critical attention, publication, and readership size. It matters more to me to do what engages my mind and my heart in full. And that\u2019s always been the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

But perhaps (as she often does) Carmen Maria Machado said it best: \u201cThey\u2019re my natural form,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI think in short stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Short story writers, in other words, are exactly what artists are supposed to be: Clear-eyed, realistic, fiercely independent, and at peace with their place at the margins of a culture that only occasionally, unpredictably, looks their way. Come find us, they say. Don\u2019t expect us to come looking for you. Seriously: you have no idea what you\u2019re missing.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Storyknife<\/a> by Jess Row is available from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every so often\u2014sometimes in October, when the annual Best American Short Stories anthology is published, or on the infrequent occasions when an iconic short story writer like George Saunders, Alice Munro, or Lydia Davis wins a major award\u2014an article appears<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4490,"featured_media":275205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070],"tags":[2945,56926,3551,1547,188,111539],"class_list":["post-275134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","tag-ecco","tag-harpercollins-publishers","tag-jess-row","tag-short-fiction","tag-short-stories","tag-storyknife","story-type-short-stories"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19zE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/typewriter-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4490"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275207,"date":"2026-08-11T05:05:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T09:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275207"},"modified":"2026-08-03T22:13:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T02:13:50","slug":"esther-kinsky-on-is-beauty-good-the-novel-by-rosalind-belben","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/esther-kinsky-on-is-beauty-good-the-novel-by-rosalind-belben\/","title":{"rendered":"Esther Kinsky on Is Beauty Good<\/em>, the Novel by Rosalind Belben"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many years ago I spent a summer in southeastern Poland. One day, on a hike, I came upon a gathering in the late morning sun. A group of people had assembled on a meadow just outside a village, an audience in waiting as it turned out, standing quietly against the backdrop of the Tatra Mountains. The craggy scarps were distant and blue, afloat in the thin dove-grey haze of early September. The musicians were arriving, one by one. All of them men, each of them with a moustache, most of them elderly\u2014or so it seemed to me at the time.<\/p>\n

Some of them carried battered black instrument bags, others came cradling their shiny trumpets, French horns and trombones in their arms. A brass band. They all wore stiff dark woollen clothes, too warm for the season and the sun, I thought. And they wore hats, at least that\u2019s what my memory tells me now, black bucket-style hats, perhaps made from felt, water-repellent and cosy, suitable for all sorts of outdoor pursuits. It took a while for each musician to take up his place at the bottom of a gentle slope facing the audience. Everybody apart from me seemed local. They knew what to expect. Occasionally someone in the audience shouted encouragement or the name of a piece of music they wished\u00a0 to hear, or maybe a joke, or whatever their tradition may have recommended for the occasion.<\/p>\n

The most striking feature of their music seemed to me its embrace of a certain dissonance, its reliance on an element of friction which was never jarring.<\/p>\n

I had so far shunned brass bands and wouldn\u2019t be able to say why my curiosity prevailed there and then. But soon I realised that not just the outfits and scenery set them apart from the parades I had occasionally happened on when I was a child in West Germany. No stomping rhythms here, no shrill blasts in unison, no sweaty masculinity souring the air, no red faces. Each of the men in their dark woollen outfits spun his own thread of sound, and each of them knew how to weave his recognisable thread into the shared texture of a melody. The most striking feature of their music seemed to me its embrace of a certain dissonance, its reliance on an element of friction which was never jarring.<\/p>\n

Rather, it emphasised a melancholy undercurrent that was anchored not in the melody but in the tiny tonal interstices which opened up where the tuning diverged ever so slightly, little gaps and cracks, each telling their own wordless tales of some past or present affliction and sorrow. It was an unexpected lesson in dissonance as an ingredient of beauty.<\/p>\n

As I read \u2018Air Ride\u2019, the second chapter of her novel, it was perhaps this element of dissonance in Rosalind Belben\u2019s writing that brought back my memories of the brass band in rural Poland many decades earlier. There were no gondolas in Poland, no gleaming tubas in the sunshine as far as I remember, but there was nature (whatever that may mean these days), there was landscape, there were mountains, there was history, and with history inevitably also melancholy.<\/p>\n

Beauty is a concept as vast as it is vague.<\/p>\n

In borderlands the ground is always disturbed by history, and south-eastern Poland is no exception. Traces of fight ing, oppression, destruction and of the unspeakable horrors of genocide overlap and mingle. Everything is infused with melancholy, the unfailing indicator of the fundamental rift between humans and their natural environment. The talkative protagonist in this chapter tries to find the language for this very rift: \u2018Nature listens, but nature is helpless to act, nature is at the mercy.\u2019<\/p>\n

At the mercy of what? The sentence trails off. History comes into the picture (\u2018These mountains have seen a lot of fighting\u2019), as does human unwillingness, or inability, to listen to something other than one\u2019s own voice. However poignant the speaker\u2019s statements, they leave gaps, they\u2019re unfinished, disjointed, dissonant, marked by omissions. Lacunae have a poetic weight of their own. Through the cracks in Sepp the tuba player\u2019s monologue, readers may try to catch a glimpse of the taciturn listener stuck in the gondola with him. The gondola swings back and forth and \u2018swims\u2019 when Sepp gets agitated. \u2018Air Ride\u2019 echoes across the Alpine scenery as air raid; a traumatic past and an unresolved conflict are mentioned without being specified. Other chapters\u2014such as \u2018The Summer Child\u2019\u2014suggest a scenery and events associated with Alto Adige and its fraught history of being torn between Austria and Italy.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Air Ride\u2019, the narrator\u2019s\u2014and apparent interlocutor\u2019s\u2014consistent silence emphasises the erratic nature of Sepp\u2019s elaborations on beauty, music, frocks and landscape. The absence of an exchange leaves the reader fingering loose threads and, in the absence of plot, listening into tonal shifts and ruptures. Loose threads are a feature of Belben\u2019s writing; they match the dissonances and, like them, eventually turn out to be the most important part of the fabric.<\/p>\n

The title of the novel\u2014and is it a novel? I did ask myself from time to time\u2014mentions beauty. Beauty is a concept as vast as it is vague. It raises questions. Where do we begin with a definition? Do we need one? It is treacherous terrain in the absence of a consensus about the norms defining beauty. Guides for the aesthetically perplexed have lost their meaning. Concepts of the beautiful diverge as much as concepts of what is \u2018good\u2019 in an ethical sense. Nature as environment, as landscape, as a force beyond the rational, and as a place where beauty and a primeval absence of bad intentions come together, has become either a commodity or an endangered space. Disturbance, distortion, destruction are the words that come to mind when we think of nature today.<\/p>\n

Belben\u2019s novel, however, originally published in 1989, doesn\u2019t seem to be concerned with a definition of beauty. Is beauty good, asks the title. Or does it? Is the absence of a question mark of significance? Is it a question at all? Or is it perhaps just a frame, a mock window offering a view of fragmented and occasionally absurd scenes located somewhere between nature, goodness and the beauty of humans, dogs and horses? These scenes are not designed to accommodate readers\u2019 expectations of a storyline: what holds them together is language, individual words which, not unlike fairy-tale pebbles, help the reader to navigate the changing texture of the narrative.<\/p>\n

The chapters seem like episodes, or fragments of episodes spread out like pieces of a puzzle, with a lot of blank space between them. There are fields of white silence, fertile ground for the imagination to shift them around, find matches or mismatches, wonder about sequences or connections. Questions around beauty and longing recur, as do keywords (such as \u2018password\u2019), names, references and scenic features, but what fascinated me most is that in principle each episode could be read as a little patchy universe on its own. There is Fritz wondering about the effect of beauty on mind and soul on his daily tram journeys in a city that seems to be Berlin.<\/p>\n

Apparently he is a guard at the Berlin Wall, observing passing pedestrians through his binoculars. Regardless of the oppression his job has come to stand for, he is concerned with questions of beauty and its potential uselessness. Wouldn\u2019t it be wiser to inure oneself to aesthetic sensibilities? To sail through life unbothered by what one sees outside, taking pleasure in little private comforts (coffee, biscuits, cake after work) without being enraptured by beauty and insulted by ugliness? \u2018There is little that is moral about beauty,\u2019 Fritz declares. \u2018Is beauty good?\u2019 he asks, but what he really seems to mean is: what good is beauty? His utilitarian pondering has a ring of fundamental hopelessness, but it points the reader in an interesting direction: is there a connection between beauty and hope? And would that make beauty good? Does it matter?<\/p>\n

Two chapters later, a man called Kai remembers Fritz\u2019s musings when he\u2019s asked to come up with a password in a military context. \u2018Is beauty good,\u2019 he proposes, and his suggestion is approved and welcomed by his comrades with a hearty laugh. Both his suggestion and the jolly appreciation seem out of tune with the situation \u2018far from home\u2019, which may be a military manoeuvre involving mock battles and bayonet practice, or a preparation for actual combat. The reader won\u2019t find out. Kai embarks on meandering reflections reminiscent of Sepp the tuba player.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s less concerned with the ethical potential of beauty than with a soldier\u2019s reading of landscape as a place for shelter, inspired by associations with the female body. The keyword here is longing. \u2018Human beings are so full of longings,\u2019 remarks Kai towards the end of the chapter \u2018Tears for Streams\u2019. While beauty remains elusive and evades definition, it is longing which emerges as the real motor of life. Longing is the Insatiable Wheel of the title of this first part of the novel, the little boy pedalling his tricycle at breakneck speed towards the mountains, again and again, no matter how o!en he is intercepted and taken back home:<\/p>\n

The third child, says the peasant in broad dialect, has a little tricycle, a toy thing for very small children, and he goes pedalling off on it, for miles and miles, at the age of three, when no one is looking, he has the urge to pedal miles, to the mountains, at the age of three, on a baby\u2019s tricycle; and the old dog always goes with him; I meet him miles from home, pedalling along like a fury, and the dog running alongside, he slips out when no one is looking, and the dog like his shadow [. . .] I call to him, Franzi, was machst du hier?, wohin?, and he smiles radiantly, not naughtily or guiltily, and says in his baby voice, bicycling, to the mountains he says, and the old dog too; and I try to explain it\u2019s dangerous, he\u2019s too young to be out in the country miles from home alone, and he smiles, and smiles, and there\u2019s no stopping him; it\u2019s my wheel, he says, my wheel is hungry, it eats and I can\u2019t stop it, it\u2019s terribly hungry, me and the dog takes it out to eat; and he waves to me, cheerfully he waves to me, a three-year-old, and off he pedals . . .<\/p>\n

His gaze remains fixed on what he perceives as perfect beauty. The pedalling boy who never gets to where he wants to be is human longing personified. But where there is longing, there is also hope.<\/p>\n

The characters in the novel are not introduced: they happen, and they talk. There is a polyphony of reflections, impressions, snippets of memories, of conversations, musings and observations, occasionally taking the reader to the edge of puzzling situations and predicaments whose significance may gradually, partially, come to light in the course of the novel. There is a constant sense of movement, of visions and voices converging, diverging, allowing gaps and silences, but also a sense of subterranean connectedness.<\/p>\n

And with every new miraculous pattern apparently forming naturally, we are more inclined to hope that beauty can be good.<\/p>\n

As a reader, occasionally unsure whether I was reading stories or a novel, I couldn\u2019t help thinking of a microscopic web of filaments running underneath the textual surface, much like a network of mycelia manifesting itself in the occasional fruiting body of a mushroom but being in itself infinitely vaster and stronger than those manifestations. The voices and visions play tricks and offer surprises, and there\u2019s a sense of humour even when tragedy is lurking in the wings. But they also expose fundamental problems of communication, the vulnerability and inconsistency of our common currency of language, its help lessness. Belben\u2019s writing catches something at the root of human existence, a state between dream and reason where all sense of belonging is suspended, making way for longing to define the self. It is also a state between words, concerned with the tiny stillnesses, the white spaces harbouring endless\u00a0possibilities without which language couldn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

The novel is set mostly outside Britain, partly in Berlin (West Berlin at the time), partly in Alpine regions where German is spoken. Occasionally German words and expressions crop up, without comment or translation. One thread that runs through the entire novel is an element of Fremde <\/i>between the lines. Fremde <\/i>is a German word, difficult to translate, although it shares its root with the English \u2018from\u2019 and originally just meant \u2018coming from another place\u2019. In its modern meaning it sits somewhere between strange and foreign and alien, a quality that strikes me as the perfect definition of what makes Belben\u2019s writing timeless. The various voices in the chapters of this novel develop into a choir defined by dissonances which shi” and go round in circles.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, I came across Rosalind Belben\u2019s work only very recently. Her poetic wit, her sense of the absurd and, above all, her subtle sense of Fremde <\/i>as a way of being in the world is something I was missing in English literature at the time when this book was first published. Perhaps, having just arrived in the UK from Europe, I was looking in other literary directions. Fremde <\/i>is a much underrated feature of human life, and Belben\u2019s engagement with it is something every reader can benefit from, aesthetically as well as ethically. Reading her writing, I was sometimes reminded of a kaleidoscope in all its deceptive simplicity: a cardboard tube with mirrors and colourful shards at one end, the shards rearranging themselves into dazzling new patterns with every turn of the tube. And with every new miraculous pattern apparently forming naturally, we are more inclined to hope that beauty can be good.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From <\/i>Is Beauty Good<\/a>. Used with the permission of the publisher, New York Review of Books. Copyright \u00a9 2026\u00a0by Rosalind Belben, introduction by Esther Kinsky<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many years ago I spent a summer in southeastern Poland. One day, on a hike, I came upon a gathering in the late morning sun. A group of people had assembled on a meadow just outside a village, an audience<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31478,"featured_media":275209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43092],"tags":[828,8815,39828,111576,34,6963,93256,1341],"class_list":["post-275207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","tag-art","tag-beauty","tag-esther-kinsky","tag-is-beauty-good","tag-music","tag-new-york-review-of-books","tag-rosalind-belben","tag-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19AP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/is-beauty-good-banner.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31478"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275310,"date":"2026-08-11T04:55:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T08:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275310"},"modified":"2026-08-10T21:15:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T01:15:17","slug":"the-responsible-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-responsible-party\/","title":{"rendered":"The Responsible Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the time Irv and Kath met, the Oberbach Corporation was ankle-deep in concrete, middle-manning the cheap Chinese labor the city needed to build its demonic underground highway along the river. Irv, a third-generation scion groomed to take over for his father, had been banned from the company\u2019s construction sites in 1968, after arriving at a ground-breaking ceremony at the future site of a nuclear shelter, a government contract, with two ounces of weed taped to the underside of his hard hat. After that, Irv\u2019s two kid brothers\u2014boys with moneyed, humiliating names like Jasper and Ramsay\u2014assumed leadership. The younger Oberbachs would helm the business for twenty years, until their indictments for masterminding a Midwest-wide salt-looting scheme wherein the company\u2019s private contractors covertly siphoned three hundred tons of snow-melt salt from the nippled government silos that dot I-80. Irv\u2019s liquid cash had evaporated by his thirty-fifth birthday, but he held onto relics of the good life. For a while, he had a guy on retainer to lacquer his thirty-four-foot Chris-Craft with a high-gloss wood polish. Varnish didn\u2019t keep the boat from sinking. He loved to party, but his coke habit was limited to what he could mooch off others. Property taxes and invasive ivy ate up his mother\u2019s big house on the North Shore, and he was no longer welcome at the Drake, so he rented a condemned lighthouse four hundred yards from the shoreline of Lake Michigan from the Coast Guard for one dollar a month.<\/p>\n

Irving\u2019s lighthouse, built for the 1893 World\u2019s Fair, was salt crusted, wind battered, and timeworn, at once a shithole and a feat of civil engineering. Its ground floor resembled a storybook cottage with a red roof, dragged from an idyll and plopped onto a twenty-foot-high foundation made of reinforced steel, concrete, and riprap rock. A cylindrical turret jutted through the middle of the house, studded with paned windows all the way up to the balconied lantern room. By 1971, most of the column\u2019s rotten tin panels had peeled away like fallen leaves off a half-dead oak, their edges sharp enough to deliver a slice of death to whomever stood below.<\/p>\n

Kath sat on a boulder as her seasickness wound down. Someone had left a speckled enamel mug on the rock, and she sniffed its contents. An air freshener\u2013flavored drink. It didn\u2019t need ice. She tasted it, and her best guess was a cocktail of orange Kool-Aid powder dissolved in Seagram\u2019s. She quaffed until the mug went empty. In an age when texting your fake Canadian boyfriend to look busy was not yet a viable option, she busied her thumbs with other projects. She loosened her wet bandage, poked at the bubble wrap blister that had refilled on her palm since the night before, and rewound it with the same dirty gauze. My Lady Clam <\/em>bobbed in the water, which didn\u2019t look so turbulent from where Kath sat. Go ahead<\/em>, the boat\u2019s nodding seemed to confirm.<\/p>\n

She followed the wooden walkway up to the lighthouse with a half-drunken stride, while the whacking bass from a stereo receiver shook the slats. When she summitted the steps, the lighthouse was only ten feet away on a patch of dead grass half the size of a football field. Its front door was six inches too short for its frame and outfitted with a bathroom push knob instead of a lever handle, almost as if the original slab had been blown from its casing by an internal explosion. Wet heat frizzled her dry lungs as she entered.<\/p>\n

Just past the vestibule, party guests undulated to a runaway groove on a fifteen-foot-wide dance floor. Their sodden footprint mazes cropped up then disappeared across the cement. In the center of the room, a few feet from the spiral staircase covered in chili pepper string lights, a dozen people simmered in the navel-high spa waters of a cylindrical tub. Chemical steam rose from the water so that Kath couldn\u2019t see any of their faces. The plastic fronds of a six-foot-tall blowup palm tree shaded the tubbers\u2019 heads, and a folding beach lounger sat unattended nearby. Despite the flow of cold air from the gap in the doorjamb, every first-floor window dripped with condensation.<\/p>\n

Four bulbs of a Medusa lamp backlit the makeshift bar wedged underneath the staircase. Its other four necks expanded upward to call attention to a gallery wall. The largest hung work was an aluminum sign illustrating CPR techniques, a relic the Coast Guard hadn\u2019t been able to pry from the wall before they vacated. Next to that, a rusted Oberbach Corporation sign, a family portrait taken in a Wild West photo booth at a carnival, and what looked like a child\u2019s oil pastel drawing of a boat, framed and signed I. Oberbach, 1965<\/em>. Kath had been expecting glamour, but in ambient lighting, the function\u2019s loucheness seemed romantic. About fifty people writhed alongside her in this room, and they all looked beautiful. She didn\u2019t see Irv or Marcy anywhere. Kath envisioned them disappearing together, and she briefly considered turning around and waiting on the Clam <\/em>until Uncle Jimmy took another trip to the mainland. But then her hand throbbed once to remind her why she\u2019d embarked, and she made her way toward the unmanned bar. The 1960s were over, which is why Kath regretted plugging her nose and wiggling her bad hand in the air to do the Swim as she cut through the dance floor. A girl at least five years older, wearing a nautical minidress and two black pigtails, extended Kath grace, backstroking behind until they reached the bar. Directly above them, a handwritten sign had been taped to the railing just before the second-floor landing: KEEP IT MOVING<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour jacket is hilarious,\u201d the girl told her. The outline of her wet triangle bikini bled through the bust of her dress.<\/p>\n

A hive pattern surfaced on Kath\u2019s back in the shape of the tiny pair of jeans. She had not intended the look as novelty wear, but now that every other girl had shed her winter coat, Marcy\u2019s loaner denim seemed babyish and ridiculous.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you drinking?\u201d the girl asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure,\u201d Kath said. She picked up an abandoned brandy snifter teeming with brown liquid from the bar and held it out for the girl to sniff.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I have half?\u201d she asked. Kath gave her the okay, and the girl took a long chug.<\/p>\n

\u201cHave you seen Irving?\u201d Kath asked when she was finished.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe guy who lives here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSomeone lives here?\u201d the girl said. \u201cThat is too wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kath kept it moving. A small hallway with a sink branched off from the main room, the corridor impenetrable until the gravitational pull of the clouded moon shifted a current of bodies to grant her access to the butler\u2019s pantry. The doors on each cabinet lining the tapered hallway had been removed from their hinges, and the open shelves displayed empty wine bottles like youth sports trophies. Beef bouillon and oregano were the only canisters on a long-forgotten mountain spice rack above the sink. She leaned on the counter, studying each jar\u2019s label, hoping she looked engrossed while waiting for the most recent doses of liquor to hit her bloodstream.<\/p>\n

Beyond the butler\u2019s pantry was a kitchen crowded with whooping men. Kath could only see the backs of their bowl cuts. As she read oregano\u2019s ingredient list a second time (INGREDIENTS: OREGANO), hot breath closed its hand around the back of her neck, and she whipped around, ready to fight. Uncle Jimmy, holding two beers and a bottle opener shaped like mermaid genitalia, stood in front of her. He still carried his duffel bag, but he\u2019d removed all of his jackets. Underneath his waders, he wore a short-sleeved T-shirt that showed off a forearm tattoo of a grinning devil in a pith helmet napping under a palm tree.<\/p>\n

\u201cEnjoying yourself?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a blast in space,\u201d Kath said, drunk now. She touched her cheek with the back of her right hand to confirm. Hot pink.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight on,\u201d he said. \u201cLeave it to Irv, the consummate host.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow does he live here?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Coast Guard considers him an employee, I think. The keeper of the lighthouse,\u201d Jimmy said. \u201cHe got the boat for cheap, but he can\u2019t drive her, not legally. So I help out.\u201d<\/p>\n

He filled her in on some details of the arrangement, though the story didn\u2019t explain why Uncle Jimmy was permitted to pilot civilians with open containers back and forth to the lighthouse in November. It wasn\u2019t what Kath was asking, anyway.<\/p>\n

\u201cI meant, how does he survive here?\u201d<\/p>\n

Uncle Jimmy laughed. \u201cHe can see the harbor parking lot from the second story,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s tougher than he looks, though. He\u2019s got running water, except when he doesn\u2019t. Iodine tabs work fine. I bring him groceries once a week, more if he\u2019s hosting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jimmy rubbed beer foam off his mustache, and Kath thought of the drunken Norwegian boatman who sank Fanny\u2019s ship.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that why they call you Uncle Jimmy?\u201d<\/p>\n

The kitchen men restarted their cheering as if someone in there was doing stage magic, and Uncle Jimmy leaned closer so he could be heard. \u201cNah. When I was nineteen, way before I knew Irv, I adopted my cousin who was fourteen months younger than me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did you do that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe both needed a roommate,\u201d Jimmy said. Mysterious. \u201cListen, I wanted to say this earlier, but we didn\u2019t have time. Last night was an accident, but it\u2019s unacceptable. He gets far too lost in the sauce and often can\u2019t find his way back.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s fine,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really not. I\u2019ve spoken to Irv, and he\u2019s going to make it right. How\u2019s your hand?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kath laid her left hand on the countertop and played a coy peek-a-boo game with the bandage. When she peeled back the gauze, her palm resembled a charred personal pan pizza stripped of its cheese. A mossy cushion of gray fuzz had sprouted from the depressions of the scorch marks. In this light, it was impossible to tell if it was sweater lint or a fungal infection. She resheathed quickly, embarrassed.<\/p>\n

\u201cOof,\u201d he said. \u201cWell. I brought you something that should help.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou brought me a present?\u201d Nobody had ever done that. \u201cYeah. It\u2019s not sexy, but it works,\u201d he said, unzipping a side pocket on his duffel and pulling out a tube of paste cratered in the middle with the indentation of a squeezing hand. \u201cIt\u2019s silver sulfadiazine. Use it twice a day. It\u2019ll keep you fresh.\u201d \u201cOn my teeth?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, don\u2019t ingest it. Tastes like Indian Head pennies. Spread it on the burn,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it legal?\u201d<\/p>\n

He laughed again, but Kath had never heard of such a thing. I have. Silver sulfadiazine is a topical cream made of suspended silver ions that slowly release to kill bacterial cells on burns. Effective, but not prescribed much anymore since the invention of hydrocolloid bandages. Colloidal silver, the suspension of metallic nanoparticles in water that ruined my career, is alleged to function similarly. Invented before modern antibiotics, the tincture has recently experienced a renaissance as a popular antiviral recommendation among the organ meat set. That\u2019s not where I heard about it, though. The cod oil\u2013pushing acupuncturist, who I suppose has gone full MAGA in the intervening years, taught me about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want to play pong?\u201d Uncle Jimmy asked her.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d<\/p>\n

The longer Uncle Jimmy elucidated the rules, the more he sounded like Ron. Kath wasn\u2019t an aural learner. She declined.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have to be nice to me because of my burn,\u201d she told him. \u201cI\u2019m good. I\u2019m just waiting for my friend to come back from the bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMarcy? You know she\u2019s over there playing,\u201d Uncle Jimmy gestured to the kitchen. \u201cNot much of an arm on her, but her trash talk is really something. She\u2019s hurting everyone\u2019s feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe can turn at any time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI do see why you\u2019re pals,\u201d he said, then poked Kath in the squishy part between her ribs and belly button. Liquid squelched aloud in her belly. Uncle Jimmy held out his hand, and she slapped it five with her good one. Their clammy palms suctioned together in the dank atmosphere before they pulled apart with a loud pop!<\/em><\/p>\n

The curtain of bang\u00e8d men parted for Uncle Jimmy as Kath followed close behind. Marcy had her hair tied up with a bow made from nylon cord and was bent over a fold-up kitchen counter rearranging wet garbage. Two of the men, beef-fed and blond, chugged beers on their knees on the other side of the workstation. Ten others looked on. When Marcy had arranged a crooked triangle of Dixie cups and sherbet dishes in front of her, she looked up and saw Kath, then beckoned her over.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is Willy and Gareth,\u201d Marcy said, pointing to the guzzlers on the floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowdy,\u201d one said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy name\u2019s Billy,\u201d the other said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry, guy,\u201d Marcy said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou got my name wrong but remembered Gareth\u2019s?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cGareth sucks shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought it was countercultural,\u201d Marcy said. The guys around her went ohh! <\/em>\u201cBilly, get up. You\u2019re gonna be Kath\u2019s partner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billy obeyed and stood next to Kath, and Marcy dictated the terms of play. Kath is competitive only about things that matter, like logging steps or shaving her legs, and the game had no bearing on her reality. She participated because, any minute now, she expected Irving to maunder into the kitchen and ask her to stand close to him in a dark alcove. Uncle Jimmy hung back by the drippy windows at the rear of the kitchen nursing a Schlitz.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour turn,\u201d Billy said, handing her a wet ping-pong ball.<\/p>\n

She overshot the ball every round, but her partner didn\u2019t seem to care. Kath understood something essential about womanhood then, that she was allowed to be stupid about certain concepts because she was a girl, even one with the wrong type of face who hated the outfit she\u2019d showed up in.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne hander!\u201d she said at one point, like that was a feat, and all the guys laughed.<\/p>\n

By the second round, a new set of male athletes had subbed in, but Kath and Marcy got to continue playing. The bush leaguers demonstrated backhand throws and bounce shots and called their opponents homo <\/em>and faggot <\/em>years before the reclamation of those words\u2014grown men, not high schoolers, all either dead or doctors by now. Kath had to admit their enthusiasm was contagious, and as the clock ran out and reset without consequence, she shared ideas for streamlining gameplay. They heard her out, let her innovate. She hadn\u2019t procured this much power since the night before when Irv forked over all his money and pills.<\/p>\n

At the end of the third set, Gareth whispered into Marcy\u2019s ear across the table, and her face took on a look of revulsion. She set her ping-pong ball down and walked away. The ball rolled to the sticky floor, littered with crushed six-pack carriers and a fine layer of winter sludge, and two competitors dove to fetch it.<\/p>\n

Marcy let them scrap on the floor as she walked away from the game, intending to grab Kath on her way out. \u201cI\u2019m going to the bathroom,\u201d she said. She blinked bright red, fighting tears.<\/p>\n

\u201cSee ya,\u201d Kath said, one eye closed. She held the ball at eye level with a shrimp claw hand and practiced her wrist flick.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re coming with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne sec,\u201d Kath told her. \u201cI\u2019m a complete jock over here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going now,\u201d Marcy said. Her voice trembled.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarcy, if you give me two minutes to finish up here, I promise to jostle the tampon up in there for you,\u201d Kath said.<\/p>\n

All the guys ooh<\/em>ed this time instead of ohh<\/em>ing. Kath threw the ball and hit the window. When she made time to look at Marcy, her friend was shoving through the crowd.<\/p>\n

Without Marcy, the game wasn\u2019t fun. When Uncle Jimmy\u2019s walkie-talkie mumbled and he declared that he was taking My Lady Clam <\/em>for a spin back to shore to pick up more guests, he cut a path through the men as she followed him out the same way that they entered. Kath wasn\u2019t leaving. She was just getting started. The time had come for her to find Irving.<\/p>\n

\u201cGotta go, fellas,\u201d she told the pong men. One of them said something about her fingering Marcy in the bathroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou ought to try it some time,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Everyone cheered. Kath was drunk enough to get the laughs she craved at home, and that was all she needed. Luck was with her as she proceeded through the bulwark of humidity that insulated the hot tub room. Her timing was precise. Behind the bar, the object of her fascination stood in a pair of duck boots, maroon swim trunks, and yesterday\u2019s Fair Isle pullover taut against his tummy. His hands were a nonstop party, shooting finger guns and patriotic salutes to his attendees. Irv\u2019s face read older under the red string lights than it had in the butter-yellow fluorescence of the Oberbach Woods McDonald\u2019s, but Kath thought he looked stately, like a country club lifeguard. She approached head-on.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Responsible Party<\/a> by Claire Carusillo<\/em>.\u00a0Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Claire Carusillo. All rights\u00a0reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the time Irv and Kath met, the Oberbach Corporation was ankle-deep in concrete, middle-manning the cheap Chinese labor the city needed to build its demonic underground highway along the river. Irv, a third-generation scion groomed to take over for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[111613,4262,111614],"class_list":["post-275310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-claire-carusillo","tag-henry-holt-and-co","tag-the-responsible-party","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Cu","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/9781250408631-scaled.avif","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275512,"date":"2026-08-11T04:01:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T08:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275512"},"modified":"2026-08-12T05:12:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T09:12:40","slug":"rachel-syme-loves-a-good-yarn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/rachel-syme-loves-a-good-yarn\/","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Syme Loves a Good Yarn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to Season Four of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good question, how do you listen for what’s unsaid, and how hard do you have to push someone before they say something new? <\/em><\/p>\n

Subscribe to <\/strong><\/em>The Critic and Her Publics<\/strong><\/a>, available wherever you get your podcasts!<\/strong><\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n