Why is 'Satellites' by Rebecca Curtis featured fiction in The New Yorker? on chrisa.substack.com via Chris Abraham.

If you want to read this short story, check it out here: Fiction July 12 & 19, 2021 Issue Satellites By Rebecca Curtis July 5, 2021.

If you want to listen to the short story, check it out there: The Writer’s Voice: Fiction from the Magazine Rebecca Curtis Reads “Satellites” With Deborah Treisman July 6, 2021.

Quotes from Satellites by Rebecca Curtis that make me wonder why this short story is featured in The New Yorker instead of in an adventure or romance novel from Gold Eagle or Harlequin.

I'll let you be the judge. “Satellites,” by Rebecca Curtis, is so basic and seems to be a short story interpretation of an Instagram Story, rife will brand names and wealth and buff dudes and ex-wives and tech money hyper-fit nerd billionaire ex-bankers. It's got all of it in there. An opening sentence of a short story, especially, is supposed to be amazing. Here's the first paragraph . . . be inspired! Incipit!

One day last July, my husband’s friend Tony Tarantino—a tall, good-looking, rib-eye-and-Scotch-loving, thrice-divorced, AB-negative Trump enthusiast—drove up from Virginia Beach to the Jersey shore to visit my husband, a retired banker, at his hulking nine-bedroom, eight-bath Tudor in the town of Coda-by-the-Sea, and after we’d all been chatting, sans masks, on the porch for a while, right after Tony enjoyed an organic, grass-fed “marrow burger” I’d picked up for him from Cavé, the excellent local paleo restaurant, his cell phone rang. He said, Hello . . . ?, then frowned and hung up. He blushed as he placed his phone on the table next to his mai tai.

Does this sound like a featured-fiction issue of The New Yorker or Hallmark Channel fan fiction? I didn't need to scroll much further to find this:

Tony’s wife was in Virginia, in the house he had bought for her. She was new—his fourth—a curvy Irish redhead, twenty years his junior, named Sinead. A paramedic. They’d lived together for a number of years, and Sinead had been pushing for marriage and babies. To please her, Tony had reluctantly consented to marriage. He loved her. More important, he said, they agreed philosophically, talked endlessly, and had fun in bed. She hadn’t come to Coda because she was shy. She couldn’t visit us, she’d said, because she’d never met us.

One cheap way to write includes dropping brand names as shorthand for where someone is in their prestige and taste. This is just lazy writing. 

Please tell me if this heralded short story that just dropped in my favorite magazine of my entire young life, The New Yorker, gets any better. And good luck to Rebecca Curtis, who is extremely beautiful and, I am sure, extremely talented. I, too, blame COVID-19 for this short story.

I assume Rebecca Curtis and all her editors were Covid-drunk the entire time and, maybe, this is the direct result of a Pfizer vaccination side-effect.

I surely might be mistaken. My taste in fiction might be extremely old-fashioned. If so, I might be an old, but I am not a Boomer. I am still "only" 51.