Earlier this month, Quillblog copped ignorance to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s work, since there was only one English title available on Amazon. Apparently, the announcement of Le Clezio the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature piqued the curiousity of the insular and ignorant North American masses, and so The New Yorker will publish one of Le Clezio’s short stories, The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea, in the Oct. 27 print issue.
“We thought lots of people would be very interested to see what his work was like,” said New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, whose translation of the short story The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea will appear on newsstands Monday. “We also wanted to move fast and publish it while people still remember his name.”
Treisman had also not read Le Clezio’s work before the Nobel was announced. An abstract of Le Clezio’s story will appear on The New Yorker’s website, though for now there’s a one-sentence write-up that sums it up: “Short story about a boy who runs away from school to be near the sea.”
