The best of last week.

I think Antonya Nelson’s “Shauntrelle” should be shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. Something’s been going on with the New Yorker fiction in the past several months, and it’s even fresher than Fanny Mann’s facelift. Keep on doing what you’re doing, fiction faction! Also, you may not realize that there’s now a fiction podcast on the website; do not miss Donald Antrim reading Donald Barthelme’s 1974 story “I Bought a Little City,” or, for that matter, Edwidge Danticat discussing Junot Diaz’s 1995 “The Dating Game.” (Diaz reads this one himself.) Pleasant discovery: Fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who did an appealingly subtle job introducing Lorrie Moore and Chang-Rae Lee at last year’s New Yorker Festival, also has a very nice voice for radio.

Other standouts: Nick Paumgarten on Mort Zuckerman, the latest in the Let Us Now Parse Famous Men series (I’d love to read Paumgarten, Ken Auletta, &c. on some of these powermongers); Rachel Hadas’s “The Cold Hill Side”; Hilton Als improbably and convincingly praising Xanadu; my friend Caleb Crain writing lightly and beautifully about the heavy subject of whaling; Oliver Sacks on the Piano Man; and, of course, David Denby on those movies.
—EG