SUMMER 2016

Forty Words

Yannick Murphy

When I was a girl I had a doll that was my size. She had a wardrobe that matched my own. When I wore the rabbit-fur muff and the rabbit-fur hat and went ice-skating, she’d wear them, too, and she’d sit beside my limousine driver, watching me. Sometimes I’d tell Michel that my doll had to sit on his lap, and while I skated in circles I’d wave to her, and Michel, thinking I was waving to him, would wave back. When it grew dark, I wouldn’t want to go home. I wouldn’t want to go back to my apartment where the heat was always on high and coming out of the vent, continually making the drapes in my . . .

Berlin

Helen Simpson

DIENSTAG/TUESDAY
 “Remind me why we’re here again,” says Adam as he watches their companions decant themselves slowly and more or less painfully from the minibus.
      “You know why,” says Tracey.
      “We must be twenty years younger than any of this lot. Thirty in Trevor’s case. And Olive’s.”
      “Fifteen,” says Tracey, smiling at the others as they approach. “Thirteen? Less. Pauline . . .

It Can’t Happen Here

David Byrne

The Budd Schulberg story “Your Arkansas Traveler,” first published in 1953, and his later film adaptation, A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan in 1957, seem both very much of their time—in the language and homespun style of the lead—and prescient. Some may see in Lonesome Rhodes, the “just folks” country-singer character, echoes of Bill Clinton, also from Arkansas, but Clinton, though maybe possessing a cynical streak, never aspired to become a demagogue. The fellow that most of us think of when we think proto-demagogue now is Donald Trump . . .

Your Arkansas Traveler

Budd Schulberg

Budd Schulberg adapted his story “Your Arkansas Traveler” as the screenplay for the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, and Walter Matthau. In 2008 the Library of Congress selected the film for inclusion in the National Film Registry.