The Braindead Megaphone (George Saunders)

You might also not know, as I did not know, what Dubai is all about or why someone would want to send you there. You might wonder: Is it dangerous? Will I be beheaded? Will I need a translator? Will my translator be beheaded? Just before we’re beheaded, will my translator try to get out of it by blaming everything on me?

the skyscraper clusters were, OK, odd-looking (like four or five architects had staged a weird-off, with unlimited funds)—but

I remember those times with great affection: the bitter Chicago cold, the vast parking lot, the world, suddenly and for the first time, transformed into something describable, with me, the Potential Describer, at its center. The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

If I say: “I ate a small candy, then a bigger candy, then a candy the size of a room, then a candy the size of Montana…,” you get the idea. You know where I’m headed. There’s a certain pleasure in this: you’re in on the joke, your mind knows the general shape of the fun to be expected. But if I just keep going (“I ate a candy the size of the United States! The size of North America! The size of—” even typing this is getting tiresome, although I would have liked to get at least as far as “I ate a piece of candy the size of Uranus!”), you are going to start to dislike me. Why? Because I’m condescending. I’m assuming that this simple, linear pattern is enough to interest you. I’m treating you like a dumb beast, endlessly fascinated by a swinging weight on a cord.

A STORY IS MADE OF THINGS THAT FLING OUR LITTLE CAR FORWARD When I was a kid I had one of these Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels to take another lap around the track or, more often, fly out and hit one’s sister in the face. A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent upon this.

The land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, in its strictness, to the land of the joke. When I tell a joke, everyone hearing knows that the joke is going to culminate in a punch line, and the intention of the punch line is to make them laugh. If it doesn’t, the joke is dumb, and I’m a dork. Likewise, when a person presumes to tell a literary short story, everyone reading knows that it is going to culminate in an ending, and that the intention of the ending is to… Well, hold on—what is the intention of the ending?

the final product is also a new respect for the originality and genius of the book, and for Twain, of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, beautifully: “His eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas.”

And although I’ve thanked you above, and because I could never thank you enough: Paula, Paula, Paula. Odd to thank the air one breathes, but crazy not to.