Rather odd, but it occured to me that several of the short stories I’ve been reading in the literary compilations such as Confrontation, Glimmertrain, America’s Best Short Stories, are written in a contemporary manner, but seem as if the narrative is taken from the 1940’s.
I can get more specific, but in general, they are almost Hemingwayesque in their portrayal of wealthy, unemployed young intellectuals traveling the globe in total freedom of time and responsibility that seems quite out of place in even today’s high society. While it is very common to either study abroad or take a summer hiatus after college graduation to Europe or some more exotic place, these fictional characters are riding buses, trains, and camels to Casablanca, Kenya as well as Paris. My visual image of them cannot dress them in current styles, but instead finds them in crisp white summer dresses and ankle strapped shoes, the men in pleated trousers and oxfords.
Am I being totally naive about an ongoing tribe of society of which I know nothing, or is there a borrowing of time and place simply being reinvented?
The other common thread seems to be a leaning towards foreign (again) and in particular, Asian settings. Maybe all this is simply the result of more well-traveled writers, or an answer (and thus posing a question) to a need for Americans themselves to seek escape further away into faraway lands.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
To a some (probably too large) extent, the people who get published in such venues ARE “wealthy, [more or less] unemployed young intellectuals”–the MFA mafia that dominates mainstream literary fiction today.