{"id":30547,"date":"2024-11-18T17:13:59","date_gmt":"2024-11-18T21:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=30547"},"modified":"2024-11-18T17:13:59","modified_gmt":"2024-11-18T21:13:59","slug":"said-sayrafiezadeh-minimum-payment-due","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2024\/11\/18\/said-sayrafiezadeh-minimum-payment-due\/","title":{"rendered":"Sa\u00efd Sayrafiezadeh: “Minimum Payment Due”"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/span><\/div>

“Minimum Payment Due”<\/strong><\/span>
\nby Sa\u00efd Sayrafiezadeh<\/span>
\nfrom the November 25, 2024 issue of\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

\"\"T<\/span>here was a minor gap in time where we didn’t get any stories by Sa\u00efd Sayrafiezadeh, but we’ve had one per year since, and this is his eighth or ninth in the magazine since they started publishing his work in 2010. I’ve tended to like his work.<\/p>\n

Here is how “Minimum Payement” begins:<\/p>\n

\n

It was four o\u2019clock in the afternoon and my phone was ringing, number unknown, which meant, of course, that it was one of the collection agencies. They had called me three days ago. They had called me three days before that. They were clearly not going to take no answer for an answer. The last time I\u2019d made the mistake of picking up, the woman had sounded as if she was about twenty years old, calling from somewhere in the heartland, speaking with flat vowels and a maternal tone, firm but loving, never mind the age difference. \u201cWe would hate for it to come to that,\u201d she said, which was code for legal proceedings. I wanted to tell her that the irony was that sooner or later someone was going to be calling her<\/em>\u00a0about the student loans she couldn\u2019t pay back. Instead, I said, \u201cNo, Ma\u2019am. Yes, Ma\u2019am.\u201d There was additional irony in the fact that the phone I was using had been bought on credit the week before\u2014because I\u2019m susceptible to sales\u2014increasing the grand total of what I owed, distributed across two Visas, one Mastercard, and an American Express, not to mention Target, Walmart, and Best Buy. But that was the kind of irony that wasn\u2019t funny. Meanwhile, compound interest was accruing daily.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What a stressful start to the week! Please feel free to drop a comment below with your thoughts on the story.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s New Yorker fiction is Sa\u00efd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Minimum Payment Due.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,238],"tags":[1461],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-30547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-said-sayrafiezadeh","tag-2024-new-yorker-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Minimum-Payment-Due.jpeg?fit=700%2C401&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-7WH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30550,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30547\/revisions\/30550"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30547"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=30547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}