TCR Story of the Month for July: "Readers and Writers" by Ryan Boudinot

Ryan Boudinot

The Committee Room proudly offers "Readers and Writers" by Ryan Boudinot as TCR Story of the Month for July. In this superb work of magic realism, a man reading on his daily bus commute strikes up a conversation with another man, a stranger, who happens to be reading the same book. Ensuing events raise fascinating questions of identity and life's purpose.

TCR Story of the Month highlights an outstanding work of short fiction published online within the preceding twelve months.

Ryan Boudinot is Executive Director of Seattle City of Literature. He's the author of the novels Blueprints of the Afterlife and Misconception and the story collection The Littlest Hitler.

Short Fiction Thrives in Magazines That Aren't Literary Journals: Hothouse Magazine, Queen's Quarterly, and Tikkun

"Oral story telling is a deeply human tradition, but it was only with the blitzkrieg of  nineteenth century mass publishing that the written short story became a specific art form. Magazines served up stories as snacks for readers, and did so with relish," wrote Paul Vidich, co-founder of Storyville, in The Millions.

Fiction was an essential part of American general interest magazines such as McClure's, Liberty, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post. These popular magazines published fiction (by writers from Mark Twain and Edith Wharton to J.D. Salinger and Ray Bradbury) alongside articles on social issues, politics, fashion, and sports.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the introduction of movies, radio, and, television, led to a decline in magazine reading as a form of entertainment. By the 1960s, general interest magazines had mostly disappeared and short fiction publishing shifted into the domain of small circulation literary journals most of which are based in academia.

Queen's Quarterly, Tikkun, and Hothouse are contemporary publications that break with the prevailing model. None of these publications is primarily a literary journal yet they all consider publishing short fiction an important part of their mission.

Founded in 1893 and based at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Queen's Quarterly, is Canada's oldest scholarly publication. In the 1930s, in order to expand its cultural influence and readership, Queen's Quarterly began publishing fiction. The work of top Canadian writers including Mavis Gallant, W.P. Kinsella, and Carol Shields has appeared in its pages.

TCR Recommends: "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" (Sixth Edition) by David Thomson

David Thomson has been writing and publishing books, essays, and reviews on film for nearly half a century. His quirky, highly subjective style can infuriate but he is so deeply knowledgeable that he never fails to hold one's attention.

"Witty, expansive, convincing, honest, more than a little mischievous and, so often, absolutely on the money, Thomson’s voice is one of the most distinctive and enjoyable in film criticism," says Benjamin Secher in The Telegraph.

A sixth edition of Thomson's best known work, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, was recently released by Knopf. In the introduction to the sixth edition, Thomson writes -- "Opinion can be emphatic, self-indulgent, cruel, tasteless -- and at times this book has suffered in those ways. But it can be creative, provocative, the start of a conversation." Thomson has mellowed and says that he no longer believes (as he did when writing the first edition of the Biographical Dictionary, published in 1975) that "not only must one like the right films but one must also like them for the right reasons" but the book remains a "mechanism for alerting you to films you have not seen and may never have heard of."

Dana Stevens of Slate calls The New Biographical Dictionary of Film the "book every movie lover should own" but warns that it is "the most idiosyncratic and deeply personal of a filmgoer’s journals masquerading as a reference work."