Holiday Remembrances

I let my subscription to the New Yorker expire last week and, sure enough, this week there’s stuff I actually want to read. Holiday remembrances by Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, and T.C. Boyle, among others. Excerpts: Zadie Smith’s “You Are in Paradise”

If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin. This may come in postcard form or as a valentine, as a framed print for your birthday or repeated many times across wrapping paper, but it will come, and it will always be a painting from Gauguin’s Tahitian period, 1891-1903. Chances are nudity will be involved, also some large spherical fruit.

Or check out Junot Diaz’s “Homecoming, With Turtle”

What I wanted more than anything was to be recognized as the long-lost son I was, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not after nearly twenty years. Nobody believed I was Dominican! You? one cabdriver said incredulously, and then turned and laughed. That’s doubtful. Instead of being welcomed with open arms, I was overcharged for everything and called un americano. I put us on all the wrong buses. If there was money to lose, I lost it; if there was a bus to catch, I made us miss it, and through some twist of bad luck all my relatives were in the States for the summer.

Links unabashedly lifted from Maud.