Recall this Story – Recall This Book

135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)

{You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here]

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, “Miles City, Montana” in our new series, Recall This Story.

135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg reading and discussing Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)

[this is the first half of the story; the second half can be found here]

128 Recall This Story: Steve McCauley excavates John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight” (JP)

We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB’ shouse sage, Steve McCauley.

And not just because he’s got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. “The Five-Forty-Eight” (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of lives unled elsewhere while ostensibly documenting nothing more than the time to takes to down a couple of drinks, scuttle feverishly through some midtown streets, and take a lumbering commuter train out of the city.