miette in the New Yorker
I occasionally ask, has Miette read you a bedtime story yet? You should let her; The New Yorker has, and they liked it, even if they mixed up one Irish lass for another (who, I wonder?).
Speaking of which, whenever I come across Eveline [txt], I always think about Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful essay about writing, in which he writes:
As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of our language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences that were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favourite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader more than those words do.