The New Yorker takes a chance!

Catching up: Last 12 posts were from the road, from my iphone, apologize for the many typos, for the short and truncated thoughts, for the superficialities, and for any other shortcomings - blame it on the technology. Much better to post @ home and from a desktop!

The New Yorker this week actually takes a chance and publishes a new writer, evidently at the beginning of his career (an MFA student in Wyoming, no less, according to the notes), Callan Wink, who steps in with a story called, I think, Dog Run Moon. It's obvious why the editors selected this piece: Wink's writing is strong a sharp and funny and full of regional details, might remind readers of some of the other tough-guy (mostly Western) writers who've come along, variously including Carver (the best), Thom Jones (where has he been), TC Boyle, and Denis Johnson, and might add Annie Proulx, at least for attention to landscape details. Story briefly about a working-class young guy recently broken off a long-term relationship living in a trailer in a lumber town and working at the saw mill, steals (or liberates, as he prefers) a neighbor's dog and, when the guys find out he's stolen their dog and come after him with a knife and gun he takes off, running naked with the dog beneath the moonlight (see title). The writing is totally captivating and his description of the menacing characters very on point and powerful. If I may quibble with this very good and very promising story, I'd have to say it's very hard to buy into this premise: would even a mournful and jilted and depressed and desperate young man do such an act, steal a dog and then run off - naked - with the dog and two madmen in pursuit on an ATV? Could anyone run through the night, eluding pursuers? Well, the whole story may be symbolic on some level, a level I missed - but I'll take the story for what it is, a glimpse into the developing possibilities of a talent on the rise.