Prose off, Why does what you people publish always have to suck? edition: Story in The Paris Review selected for publication by tote bag saleswomen Emily Stokes v. Fleming story

Wednesday 4/9/25

It's always easy to click on any work of fiction from The Paris Review and copy and paste any part of it for one of these prose offs. You're bound to get something pretentious, lifeless, stilted, boring. Have a tote bag Gertrude, indeed.

Fossil-classist Emily Stokes gets off on this kind of stuff, dry gulch style. The inclusion of the right kind of miserable, entitled person. You can't really say, "Is there any fiction worse than what's in The Paris Review?" because what you get there is what you get at many other venues.

But there's no way that it's meant for reading. It's meant so that people for whom the above adjectives apply can pat themselves on the back. There's a prevailing smugness, which, of course, stems from the insistence on the galling classism.

We don't have to do too much preamble here. It's enough to show the work. This is from Domenico Starnone's "Verba," selected for publication in The Paris Review by Emily Stokes. Ready to be thrilled and moved? I bet you are.

The bimonthly meeting was scheduled for three o’clock. The attendees included: my colleagues, depressed after a long day of work; two mothers, eager to represent fifty parents who couldn’t care less about being represented; and two precocious students⁠—Stefano D’Ovidio and Liliana Meneghini⁠—who were easily corrupted by the discovery that, as class representatives, they could say things they never could otherwise.

When I walked into the room, everyone was staring at a caricature that someone had drawn on the chalkboard: me as a bumbling giant with a hunchback and the neck of a giraffe, embracing a voluptuous student and planting a kiss on her cheek. Below the girl they’d written “Giusy Solofra, teacher’s pet.”

As soon as they saw me, the two mothers, the two students, and my colleagues all ceased their snickering. Then, in unison, everyone proceeded to feign horror⁠—“There’s no such thing as respect anymore, no such thing”⁠—as I hurriedly erased the board and sputtered, “No, no, it’s not like that at all. The kids love me. We talk freely, we have an antiauthoritarian, democratic relationship, like brothers and sisters⁠—isn’t that right, D’Ovidio?”

My colleague Calamaro, whom the principal had delegated to lead the meeting in his place, muttered, “You have no idea how much a babysitter is costing me.” She went on to appoint me secretary, which essentially meant taking minutes, writing down verbatim what was said.

I put up the usual fight. “Why is it always me?” 

“Because you’re Literature.”

“So?” 

“So if I had to file taxes I’d ask Zinale, since he’s Accounting.” 

I turned to Zinale and whispered, “It’s your turn, you freak.”

“No,” Zinale replied, happy to hold a business degree. 

“What are you, illiterate?”

“Yup,” Zinale said, more smug than ever.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the two mothers whispering to each other, probably saying, These teachers don’t even know how to string proper sentences together!

They’re illiterate!

“Fine”⁠—I had made my decision⁠—“I’ll do it. But you’ll pay for this one day, Zinale.” Calamaro moved to start the meeting.

Depressed, I wrote: “November 5, 1990: the staff meeting commenced at 3:10 p.m.”

“Literature,” Calamaro began.

In schoolspeak, Literature means me, because that’s what I teach. I had to briefly report on how the class was doing. In long, flowing, well-constructed sentences, I said that I had no significant complaints about the students, except for a certain group of kids⁠—and here I stared meaningfully at D’Ovidio and Meneghini⁠—who occasionally interrupted my lessons. Then I wrote down what I had just said but in an even more elegant form.

I know--you hate it. It's not meant to be liked. It's not meant to be read.

Doesn't that astound you? All of these people writing things--and awarding things, and hyping things, and publishing things--that aren't meant for people to actually spend time reading?

If you wrote the above, and you had to stand in front of people and read it out loud, how do you think that would go? Pretend it was "normal" people, and not these kinds of people.

Would you feel confident as you read? Would you be thinking, "They're loving this! I can feel the excitement in the room!"

And wow, here we are yet again: a literature teacher. Do these people ever give it a rest with that?

Imagine if someone was interviewing Emily Stokes about why she chose to publish the likes of this?

The interviewer asks, "What's good about this? What's notable here? What makes this amazing in your view? Why should we care? What does this have to do with anything? Do you think this is brilliant? Do you think this is a work of genius? Is this dramatic? Consequential? Funny? Relevant? To whom? Is this supposed to be entertaining? Edifying? What is someone supposed to get out of this story? Is this meant to convey and illuminate an essential aspect of the human experience?"

Let me ask you: What's great here?

Is this great: "She went on to appoint me secretary, which essentially meant taking minutes, writing down verbatim what was said."

Did that impress you?

Shouldn't there be some evidence that the writer is actually good at writing?

How the hell does that never enter into any of this?

What in the above is not ordinary? What couldn't be done by anyone else? How is that better than an email you get at work? Your kid's school newsletter? Your co-op's minutes from the annual meeting?

Why do you need to read this? What does it do for you? For anyone?

What is here?

What is on offer here?

What is in this for a reader?

Why should they read this?

Give me one fucking reason.

Okay, maybe you want to respond, "Well, people don't know the difference between 'then' and 'than,' and I think this writer does," like that's now what constitutes good writing.

Is that what we're doing?

What do you think would have happened--before I started exposing her on here--if I wrote the above--I know, I know, but play along--and had sent that to Emily Stokes?

Think she would have ran that story if it had my name at the top instead of this person's?

Obviously she wouldn't have run it.

Or what? That's what would have done the trick? That would have been the magic story? The work they had to have?

"Mr. Fleming, it would be honor to publish your 'Verba.' I can scarcely state my gratitude, such is its volume and expansiveness, for you having sent us this most admirable work. We all agreed how much your story stood out from thousands of others, and were, as an editorial team, collectively staggered."

This is so insane.

But that's what you're going to get with insane people. Warped, bitter, hateful, toxic, bigoted, incompetent, petty people like Emily Stokes. And company.

Or maybe I'm missing something. Is this brilliant: "The bimonthly meeting was scheduled for three o’clock."

No?

If you're one of them, and you're tempted to take up the cause and say, "Not every sentence will stand out, that's not the role of every sentence," then you find me one--any sentence from the above--that is not blah, blah, blah, ordinary, anyone can do this, blah, nothingness, flatness, blah.

I dare a single one of you. You give me your testimonial as to that story's brilliance, and I'll put you up on here, with your name, a link to your website if you have one.

As crazy as most of these people are, they're not that crazy.

They wouldn't do that out in public. They know that none of this is any good, and it's one thing in the darkness of their rats' nest--apologies to rats, which are intelligent creatures--to do their bullshit and say make their platitudinous statements that they know no one will vet, and it's another to have to deal publicly with what we can all see as the truth.

Also, there's never been a coward like these cowards. Anything like this they'd have to do behind the back, not out in the open. And they also don't want to look a total moron, which is what would happen if they tried to defend any of this writing as brilliant on the record.

Who would?

And I'm sure you loved this: "Then I wrote down what I had just said but in an even more elegant form."

Because who doesn't like a narrator who's a smug prick when just about everyone in a system of incestuous evil is themselves this way?

Talk about preaching to the choir, right?

If you were these people, how could you not be kept up by the knowledge of what an imposter you really were, always worrying that people will find you out and say the truth out loud.

Everyone knows if they see anything you write or do or stand for.

But that's the key, isn't it? Control the environment. Control who comes into the room and who is locked out. Put a lid over the whole thing from the public so that none among their number can object (or mock you). Make sure you're surrounded by people like you, with the same crippling issues, and enter into a pact in which everyone lies and covers for each other, and allow no truth, which can gum up the works and cause that person, and each of these people, to cave in further upon themselves.

To help that process along, here's something from a story I've been working on.

So, yes, there was that kind of trouble. The Ryan Jacobson kind. Kevin Grant wasn’t Ryan Jacobson bad. His single-parent family didn’t have a lot of money, whereas Regan Wenderlau’s—with all of its members present and accounted for—did.

Her mom was the type of person who viewed helping others as an act of service that those people were really doing for her, because otherwise she wouldn’t feel like she was of much use, including to herself, the latter being the person with whom she struggled, and let down, the most.  

At Thanksgiving, Regan’s family had gotten a turkey for Kevin’s family. They were close, the moms, taking up their respective roles in a perpetual process of incidentally—as if without strain, energy, and time—doing things for each other.

The offering of fare for the table happened to be one example done via the wife and mother—and the friend—from the family of greater financial means. Kevin’s mom, meanwhile, provided the gift of listening and listening well, being a true confidant, for which there was no price point.

They both believed themselves—in the manner endemic to friends who have ample reason and evidence to be truly grateful for each other—to have accrued a form of kindness-based debt that they were always looking to repay—and, maybe, overpay. Not so that the other noticed, but that she’d still able to make use of the extra bit all the same.  

Thus, their friendship, like a two-person world from which the world at large might itself be taught an imperishable lesson, went ‘round and ‘round, compromised only—and perhaps also actuated—by the incursions of guilt experienced by both women that they weren’t doing enough for their friend, or couldn’t think of more to do, or were themselves that much of a shameful failure as a so-called grown-up out here in the thick, determining weeds of life—where a person should be secure in one’s adult self and less like a teenager scared what the other kids would think, or capable enough at something, anything, to earn a sufficient salary for the kids to have some new clothes every now and again—that they needed the propping up in the first damn place.

Secretly, both Mrs. Wenderlau and Ms. Grant feared that if they performed fewer acts of goodness in a relationship where each woman concluded she got far more than she gave, then they’d lose their friend. Which isn’t to say that’s why they were friends. But it was true nonetheless.

Kevin didn’t remember his long-departed father, and once during a seemingly unending lunch period—which he understood, as it was transpiring, to be an episode in his life he’d never forget—he was compelled to summon the entirety of his will in order to pretend not to be bothered when his friends first theorized, and then insisted with unshakable, loudly-expressed, laughter-punctuated conviction, that he’d been secretly sired by Mr. Kleiber, which explained—to the thinking of boys—Kevin’s consistently high math grades.

Little wonder his mother never came to any school events: She couldn’t face her former lover. She might break down right there on the spot and beg the old guy to give it to her again in front of Harold the janitor with his deluxe model wet-dry vacuum who’d definitely need to clean the floor after, and give it to her as only Mr. Kleiber and his well-polished needle-dick ever had. Couldn’t have been because she was always at any of a number of her jobs.

The boy seethed. He wanted to hit everyone. Knock tongues down the backs of throats to mix with the acid in stomachs and disintegrate. End all words. Send eyeballs flying.

But he laughed it off, as one does, in order not to risk growing the torment. Less a case of living to fight another day, and more like trying to live until the weekend, over whose forty-eight hours enough forgetting might be achieved so that nothing stuck and got resumed come Monday. Even young boys are old hands at being boys. And no one wants to not have any friends.  

If this was a basketball game, that's like one team beating the other team 5000 to 0.

Anyone who sees this--or any of these side by side comparisons--knows how much better the Fleming work is than the work by whomever the other person is. Emily Stokes knows it. It's impossible not to know it.

Remember those questions above from the imaginary interview? Want to ask yourself the same questions about the excerpt from my story?

Really easy to answer those questions, isn't it?

The thing about this, too, is that I'm the only one who can do it. None of these people create any separation from each other in what they write. It's all the same shit. Indistinguishable from one to another. Half dozen of one, six of the other, as they say. You couldn't do this if your work was ten percent better, fifteen, twenty, fifty, 100. That wouldn't be enough separation such that there would be literally no one who could say that the first example was anywhere near as good as the second. Your work would have to be so much better that you obliterated the math. Your obliterated the very notion of someone up to no good being able to fall back on mealy-mouthed bullshit like, "It's art, it's all subjective."

Can't do it here.

But imagine how effectively you'd be able to pretend you weren't dumb if you had a Paris Review tote bag and a New Yorker tote bag? Wow, right? Use the one on Monday, the other on Tuesday. Keep mixing it up. You could fool everyone!