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Rereading Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980), I found it difficult to adjust to her elliptical, portentous narrative style. After a few pages, however, something clicked, and I realized I was reading a master work: indirect but smoothly and intelligently told, with compelling characters and gorgeous prose.

In brief scenes densely packed with revealing detail and irony, the novel covers the lives of two Australian sisters, Caroline (or “Caro”) and Grace, orphaned as girls in 1938, who embark upon their romantic lives when they arrive in London, all grown up, some years after the end of World War II.

Caro receives the lion’s share of the novel’s attention—Hazzard clearly prefers her self-possession and independence of mind. She is pursued throughout the book (and her life) by an astronomer named Ted Tice, who, like Hazzard, idolizes Caro. She doesn’t reciprocate his passion, and most of the book is about love affairs

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Benjamin Chambers writes:

Don’t miss two goddesses of contemporary fiction in this month’s New Yorker fiction podcast: the incomparable Louise Erdrich reads Lorrie Moore’s “Dance in America.” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Honest.

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The latest installment of our column about New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.

In her review of Ha Jin’s story “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” which appeared in the April 7 issue of The New Yorker (TNY), Sarah of the blog Sarah Writes says that the story, although written in English, “successfully captures the inflections of translation, and replicates translators’ reliance on stock expressions to replace untranslatable idioms.”

She finds this aspect of the story “distracting,” but that’s neither here nor there, as her comments immediately brought to mind a different language problem that’s been on mind lately as I read each week’s story in TNY: translations from the British.

Anyone who grew up on a hefty diet of P.G. Wodehouse and English detective fiction would have no trouble with

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The latest installment of a new column on New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.

It occurred to me that it would be fun to do occasional posts on fiction that appeared in The New Yorker 50 years ago. To start off, I simply did a quick scan of The Complete New Yorker (CNY) for fiction published in 1958, and son of a gun, I came up with a winner right away: Michael J. Arlen’s delightful “Are We Losing the Novel Race?” from April 19, 1958. (This particular Arlen, by the way, is not to be confused with his father, the popular Armenian writer mentioned in one of the earliest issues of TNY, who later made the cover of Time.)

“Novel Race” deftly and briefly satirizes domestic fears, post-Sputnik, that America was falling behind the Soviets—in this case, in the length of its novels. And even though

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The latest installment of a new column on New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.

Worried that the short story’s dead? Naah. For proof, check out this stinging rebuttal.

Following The New Yorker’s excellent fiction podcast? In June 2007, Edwidge Danticat talked with TNY fiction editor Deborah Treisman about Junot Díaz’s story, “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” following a reading done by Díaz himself. I can’t swear there’s a connection, but this week, Danticat and Díaz took home awards from the National Book Critics Circle for their latest books. (So did TNY critic Alex Ross; Joan Acocella was a runner-up. Click here for a complete list of “winners and nominees.)

The really big news, though, was the demolition derby won by Louise Erdrich.

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