The Paris Review‘s recent spring 2009 issue features an amazing fiction peice entitiled At the Zoo, by Caitlin Horrocks. At the Zoo is centered around a young mother who takes a day off of work to supervise her father’s interaction with her son during a visit through the zoo. The mother doesn’t trust her father’s ability to take care of her son because as a child she experienced his often abusive sarcasim and careless paternal instincts. As the story progresses and the zoo trip turns into an odyssey, the mother butts heads with her father and the son is lost somewhere in the middle. At the Zoo is weakened by a predictable ending but the reader gets to view the actions of an anxiety ridden and distant mother who worries about everything including the possibility that her six year-old son is gay, a “mad scientist” who keeps sending her schematics of a phallic-shape time machine, and a obscene joke that her father once made at her mother’s funeral. The mother’s excessive anxiety and worrying is a clear hallmark of 21st century psychological habits that we, as a society, foolishly allow to consume us.

The Paris Review‘s spring 2009 issue also features a bland interview with Annie Proulx who regrets writing Brokeback Mountain and claims that creative writing students should learn to “cut their teeth” on novels first because the short story and novella form is harder to control because of its limited length.