“Blur" by Carmen Maria Machado

LeVar Burton Reads

Stitcher

Arts, Performing Arts

4.9 • 17K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A woman in a troubled relationship loses her glasses at a rest stop along the highway, and the world shifts in and out of focus. Content advisory: explicit language, abuse From the forthcoming collection A BRIEF AND FEARFUL STAR, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses (www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/LEVAR) and Native (www.nativedeodorant.com code: LEVAR).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.
0:10.0	Where, in every episode I hand pick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.
0:19.3	The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.
0:27.2	Well, y'all, today I have another gorgeously written piece of prose from an author whose
0:33.2	been requested quite a lot on the podcast.
0:36.8	Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist
0:44.1	for the National Book Award and the winner of a pile of other prizes including the Bard Fiction
0:50.0	Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature
0:55.8	Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.
1:03.8	Her memoir in the Dreamhouse will be published in November of 2019.
1:10.0	Carmen's writing is a delicious blend of surrealism and horror and today's story, Blurr,
1:19.8	is a perfect example.
1:22.0	Much of this story is mundane.
1:24.8	I mean, a woman stops at her rest stop during a long drive and she takes off her glasses,
1:29.6	displaces her face, goes to put them back on and she can't find them.
1:33.4	There's no one lurking behind a corner, there are no ghouls or gossesses.
1:40.2	But the story is nestled in a very surreal environment that keeps shifting beneath our
1:46.7	feet just when we think we have our balance.
1:50.9	Is this story tragic?
1:54.6	Is it sprinkled with hope?
1:57.3	Maybe a bit of both.
1:59.6	Carmen's writing really lives in the contradictions.
	...

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