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This Week's
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Friday, June 02, 2006
Friday! !!! Dinosaur Jr. !!!
Americans are comfortable with certain kinds of moral ambiguity—hard rock and hip-hop are full of harsh conclusions and unpleasant world views—but we prefer our British bands to be picker-uppers.
I never cared for minimalism, never cared for Raymond Carver or Bobbie Ann Mason or Ann Beattie or the whole Iowa School, but there are two, the late Breece Pancake and the still wonderful Amy Hempel, who made miniaturism work as it should: making mysterious and uncanny and large the small. "I leave out a lot when I tell the truth," says the narrator of "The Harvest," perhaps Hempel's most famous story (itself a brilliant deconstruction of the minimalist trend). As a reader, I want to be swerved, and Hempel swerves me almost every story. |
