Prose off, what is there even to say edition: Story by Guggenheim winner, National Book Award finalist, Best American Short Stories regular Mary Gaitskill in Granta v. Fleming story

Wednesday 9/16/26

Doing this quickly. I have things to write. Don't need to set this one up much. Everyone who sees this will see it for what it is, this system for how it really works, and the immeasurable gap in ability between these two writers.

Mary Gaitskill has received a Guggenheim. She has been a fiction finalist for the National Book Award. Her short stories appear regularly in Best American Short Stories. Her fiction runs in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review. She's seventy-one. She has been handed things for a long time.

Her story "Intercession" went up on Granta's website on September 10. Because Granta publisher, billionaire heiress, blamer of people who compel her family to hide their corpse, and odious classist extraordinaire Sigrid Rausing thought it was so amazing. As did Granta editor Thomas Meaney. Ditto Granta deputy editor Luke Naima and Granta senior editor Josie Mitchell. I'm sure that was it. They received this story from Gaitskill's agent and were blown away by its quality and talked excitedly amongst each other about what a masterpiece this is. Totally an envisionable and creditable thing. You don't have to suspend all reason to think that happened, no sir.

I figured on grabbing the newest story on Granta--it's not like I have to dig to find the suck--this morning for a prose off, and this just happens to be it, so we're using it. To the surprise of no one with so much as an acorn-sized brain who follows any of this, it's about an English department, with buzzwords like DEI, and a theater board. Your standard system people lifelessness, which reads as if it were just coughed up, academic hairball-style, by AI. Ready?

Laurie listened with oh-no-not-again dismay. A few months back a former colleague from the city (Cara) had shared a story of fantastical persecution in which she was being undermined in the English department by assholes who, newly empowered by the anti-DEI bloodbath, had spread rumors about her incompetence, hinting that she had only been hired to appease the old regime’s BS. Which unfortunately did not sound paranoid – until Cara expanded the story to declare that these people had not only blackballed her in the department, they had not only smeared her university-wide; they had done it on a national level where they were trying to make it impossible for her to publish. Hundreds of people were involved she said and it wasn’t only coming from anti-DEI pricks; she had no allies among her fellow queers because of some inconsequential thing she’d once put in an email about needing to be ‘a warrior’ on behalf of young girls who were ‘cutting their breasts off ’ in order to transition – a pure terror response to being female in Cara’s opinion. ‘I don’t even remember that email,’ one of her erstwhile allies had said when Cara confronted them. ‘I just don’t like you.’

‘And that was just the start,’ said Eileen. ‘There was this other woman on the dom/sub site, like, kind of famous in the theater world – older but still beautiful and incredibly seductive, I mean emotionally; we started messaging and I kind of fell in love with her. And he knew that, and so he went to use her as a weapon. He basically replaced me with her, except that they’re using the work I did with him – she’s basically stealing the characters I created with him, this rich, famous woman is stealing from me! After pretending to be my friend and even –’

Laurie turned off the main walkway and took a narrow path down into the landscaped convent grounds, past wood-cut Stations of the Cross nailed to a series of quietly triumphant trees leading to a stony rise; a stone female acolyte stood with face uplifted in joyful prayer before a stone crypt built into the earth, half hidden like a child’s secret. She seated herself on a bench, rested her phone on her thigh and gazed beyond the grounds at the gentle swells of wooded earth, subsiding toward a distant flash of river . . .

‘It’s just insane!’ cried Eileen. ‘But honestly I don’t care about the big star. Because she is evil and I think it’s going to all blow up on her. It’s just a matter of time. I’m more upset about Jen partly because she can do more immediate damage and also because I don’t think she’s really responsible for this. She isn’t that strong or that malicious and frankly – even though she’s the star of Brickbat Theater and a member of the board, she’s always seemed kind of lacking a center. Some people need to be at the center exactly because they lack a center. And he’s a total, I mean total dom. But he wouldn’t scare her because he comes on like a good Daddy – that’s how he gets in. Acting very protective, very moral, always asks permission, blah blah. I could see him totally controlling her mind. I think he is, actually. I can see it on her face. He’s making her do this.’

‘Wait,’ said Laurie. ‘How do you think he’s doing that?’

‘I can’t describe it! But I can sense it, you know what I mean? You must’ve seen relationships like that?’

‘No,’ said Laurie. ‘Not really. Not actual mind control.’

I think we can all let out a big collective, "Ugh." Talk about, "oh-no-not-again dismay," right? It's so childish, too, isn't it? So forced, false. What's that joke on Frasier about Martin reminding Frasier of Bob Hope dressing up as the Fonz? This is like the boomer fiction version of that.

Now we'll do this. It's from "Dead Thomas." A section that actually changed yesterday, as outstanding as it already was.

“'Sup,” Thomas would inquire and nod when we passed each other in the hall, which I gathered isn’t how people from the 1940s spoke, but you adopt the parlance of those around you. That’s how accents happen and it’s no different with the dead and the living, which are confusing terms that happen to get used like everyone knows exactly what they mean.

They say that no matter how hard of a situation you’re in and how long it goes on for, you’ll eventually act like you did before that situation started. Show the regular signs of life. Which doesn’t mean totally. But your pain won’t be shot though every word that leaves your mouth. You won’t walk around crying. People in prison smile, including the falsely convicted. And people in worse things, like concentration camps.

I saw a picture in history class. Two girls at a fence on a winter day you could tell was colder than cold. Their fingers poking through the holes. The only parts of them that were ever going to get out even for a moment. I know, because on the next page you learned what happened to them. Each girl had on a single torn mitten. They must have had only two between them so they shared. A mitten for you, a mitten for me. And there they were, laughing.

I wonder if Thomas felt the same way. He became one more boy, another boy, with the taking of each test or the latest reminder from Ms. Kathleen that Shakespeare was funny whether we knew it or not, groundlings that we were, except he was the boy that people said made you think.

They didn’t say about what. I thought about where something ends and something else begins. Lives, loves. The unholy, holy why-ness of it all. The officially unofficial dividing lines.

It’s like when a year gets off to a rocky start because a few bad events happened early and someone says, “Going to be a hell of a year.” They make it sound as if the beginning has ordered for all the other days before they got to the restaurant. Except a new year finishes every day. And starts every day. Today is the day a thousand years came to a close and another thousand years began. Yesterday could have said the same. Just like tomorrow. It isn’t where anything begins and stops, but where you’re counting from. If that’s what you want to be doing.

We sat in the library together sometimes after school, me and Thomas, when Rachel was getting extra help for math so she wouldn’t have to totally deceive her parents about being a devoted student.  

Lately she’d been talking about whether she should lie down under a truck to get closer to Thomas or shoot herself or simply sit in a car and drink the exhaust. For some reason, Rachel thought exhaust was like a beverage we’d get at Starbucks when one of us had a gift card.

I said, “Fuck no, Rachel, you need to live, your life hasn’t even started yet,” which seemed to confuse her.

“Has yours?” she responded, honestly wanting to know, with me fighting the urge to say it didn’t matter. 

The prevailing wisdom was that once the day was over, you shouldn’t bother Thomas if you happened to still be on school grounds. That would be like knocking on someone’s door when you didn’t have plans. He had to stay put, after all. But I couldn’t help myself and I don’t think he minded.

As Thomas was studying for another of Mr. Margolis’s tests that he was certain to ace, I looked across the table at him and said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“I don’t know your dad,” Thomas replied, answering me without needing to hear my words. “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”

Thomas didn’t have any more of a clue than I did. At least not about that. He reached out and put his hand over mine. He was able to touch you, but you only felt it at first.  

What do we say? The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains. Look at all that life.

How do you even compare these things qualitatively? It isn't subjective. "Well, to me the first excerpt is better because..." That's not a thing here. Obviously it's not a thing. This is as plain as it's raining out and it's not raining out and the sun is high in the bluest of skies.

The corruption of these people. The bigotry. The discrimination. The clan mentality. The revolting classism. And the lifeless, interchangeable, meaningless writing.