The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three KATs (for fiction), Anunobys (for essays), or Brunsons (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one KAT, Anunoby, or Brunson indicates a generally positive review.

🏀 Fiction

“Pig Lab” by Will Mackin. One KAT. body, boys, boxes. I’m currently reading this year’s Pulitzer Fiction winner, Angel Down, a borderline-splatterpunk WWI fantasy story which I’m finding fairly offputting, less for its grotesqueness and more for the thin characters and played-straight Christian iconography. I’m glad Mackin has arrived with a slightly less squicky but equally disconcerting tale of war horror, this one properly contemporary but similarly near-fantastical in its depiction of a (real, recently phased-out) practice of pig combat wound treatment. The Animal Farm “impossible to say which was which” effect is predictable but effective, all the more so because it reaches its climax in the middle of the rather trim story, not at its end. Unfortunately, the awkwardly-wedged-in B-plot, in which the central character comforts his wife after a panic attack, is far less convincing and doesn’t really deepen the story of survival mechanisms Mackin is trying to tell. It’s both too neat and disconnected. But stay for the squeakers.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“The Popularity Contests of ‘Love Island’” by Lillian Fishman. One Anunoby. viewing, villa, victorious. A short, vibey introduction to the increasingly popular show. As a reality-competition partisan, I can’t quite bring myself to accept Island as part of that genre because the rules are so flexible and arbitrary, without even the pretense of a “standard” game-day. (Are You The One? is the only decent true competition dating show I know of in the current era, and MTV’s failure to make more bisexual seasons after the first one is deeply inexplicable; Too Hot to Handle also counts as competition, but is unwatchable.) The lede here is underbaked and the piece never quite becomes an actual essay; it’s more like a reader’s digest of a fairly unliterary work. I reached out to a friend who’s a fan for the inside take, who says Fishman is “mostly spot on about the appeal” of the show and how its romance “happens in public, not just to the audience but to the fellow islanders.” However: “I think she’s way too easy on Toni and Shakira, who were genuinely so mean I’m surprised they were able to stay on TV. And having them and two of the most toxic boys in Love Island history host the review part of the show tells me that the audience (a stand-in for the public writ large) want our society to be meaner and more petty, which bums me out.”

🏀 Random Pick

“David Garnett” (Books) by V.S. Pritchett. (August 18, 1980). No Brunsons. country, conglomerate, cobblestones. I didn’t realize there was a literary V.S. other than Naipaul. This is a dull little blurb of the memoir of an old British man – ex of the Bloomsbury group – who, naturally, had many famous friends. His book is called Great Friends, which would offend me greatly if I was the man’s friend and didn’t make the cut. (John Galsworthy over me?!) I am not opposed to such things on principle, but this offered nothing to amuse or enlighten. You can read the whole book here, though, if it pleases. More interestingly, this marks the first issue I have “completed” according to the somewhat arcane and rarely articulated rules of this section: Every author gets one piece per “topic”; I keep spinning the random number generator until it lands on something applicable, and I read everything it spins on without a formal review unless I really don’t want to. Before the Pritchett, I spun up a Kael movie review (both exemplary and not nearly her best) and a very dry but not totally airless city hall piece from Andy Logan (previously). This issue was also selected early in the life of this feature, November 2024, when I rolled a very long E.J. Kahn piece on the year’s Olympics, which I apparently found readable (“if you wish old episodes of SportsCenter were hosted by Alistair Cooke…”) but have mostly forgotten. There’s no other long-format nonfiction in the issue! So that’s one down, 4500-ish to go.

🏀 Something Extra

My theatergoing is taking a long-anticipated summer slowdown while I embark on the NYC Teaching Fellows, a two month intensive program from which I will emerge qualified to teach in public schools. Since last, though, I made it out to three very nicely produced shows that, in various ways and for various reasons, didn’t fully click for me. Those are Amaze, the magic show at New World Stages; piano indie-musical I’m Almost There; and meta clown-dance double act And Then the Rodeo Burned Down. All are well worth seeing (I mean, the magic show is only worth seeing if you like an extremely normal magic show), I just can’t rave, so I won’t.

Sunday Song: