The best story reader I've ever heard: current New Yorker story

Tony Early's story in current New Yorker, Jack and the Mad Dog, or something like that, recalls the stories that John Barth (and to some degree Coover and Donald Barthelme, the pantheon of the postmodern) wrote in the 1960s and 70s, taking on familiar tales, sometimes fairy tales, or myths and re-telling them, sometimes from a new perspective, sometimes as a way to experiment with narrative voice - Barth's best and most famous being his retelling(s) of the 1001 Nights from the POV of Sheherezad's kid sister who allegedly sat at the foot of the bed and heard all the narrations. At the time these stories felt very countercultural and au courant - i'm not sure how well they would hold up today. Early's is in this tradition - a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk looking at his life after the giant-slaying - and it does have some potential as a theme, Jack as fading celebrity or aging athlete - though Early doesn't make much of the plot possibilities - the entire story is a drunken dreamlike fantasy in which Jack is victim of several supernatural occurrences - encounter with a rabid talking dog, meet-up with a swarm of "maidens," some of whom he apparently seduced back in his glory days - mostly, I don't really care about any of this. Why would we read a retelling of a fairy tale? I think either to put the fairy tale in a new light or to put our own lives in some new light - it's not really a way to gain consciousness of an author or a culture, but it's a viewpoint into the nature of storytelling and narrative (that's why the postmodernists were fascinated with this mode). Though Early doesn't capitalize on the potential of his material, he does build a lot of humor into this story - another way in which he reminds me of Barth: this story would work very well if read aloud, would benefit from good timing and delivery. Some of the lines that seem arch when read in print would work well with an audience (e.g., Jack, stuck in a field of corn, exclaims: Shuck you!). Barth was one of the best story-readers I've ever heard - I think of him in a comic tradition extending back to Twain and Dickens; I imagine Early is a great reader as well and, though it's a bit of a back-handed compliment, I wish I'd heard this story rather than read it - like many tales, it's part of the oral tradition more than the written.