new yorker
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The Loneliest Art
Does screenwriting qualify as “real” writing? Over at the New Yorker, Richard Brody wonders what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed shot at Hollywood reveals about film as an industry and as an art: Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s…
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Interrogating Adrian
Over at Granta, Francisco Vilhena interviews Adrian Tomine, the artist and illustrator responsible for bringing us Shortcomings, Summer Blonde, and any number of illustrations for the New Yorker. Tomine riffs on the origins of his stories, landing a job in…
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A Book Voyage with No Guide
As the number of Americans who read books has declined, those who do read have begun wearing t-shirts, carrying tote bags, and sticking magnets on their fridges declaring their love of reading. Some book lovers even perform “book stunts,” reading…
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This Week in Short Fiction
In this, the first week of June, a band of storytellers joined hands and exhaled sweet stories that rolled out like a giant park full of empty hammocks waiting to hold readers through the long summer days… For example: On…
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Saul Bellows Revived
Saul Bellow’s 1978 story “A Silver Dish“ has been has been re-released over at the New Yorker. The piece follows Woody Seblst, a successful businessman, before abandoning its conventional plot structure entirely; Bellow’s prose seeps into the Great Depression, the rise…
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Resurrecting a Monster
Forty-one years after his death, JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf has been published by his son Christopher. Tolkien translated Beowulf early in his career, yet never published it. In the New Yorker, Joan Acocella speculates on the reason: Another possible…
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Some Inheritance
Ian Parker profiles Edward St. Aubyn in this week’s issue of the New Yorker, delving into the “family disaster” that shaped much of the writer’s fiction: … [he] recalled some of his life’s most fraught experiences with steady irony, and…
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George Carlin versus Vladimir Putin
The New Yorker pulled this from Pushkin’s “The Wagon of Life;” it contains swearing: At dawn we jump inside the wagon. Happy to break our necks like glass, We scorn life’s hedonistic languor, And yell “Man, fuck it! Just haul…
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Traveling with Zweig
Wes Anderson’s latest film The Grand Budapest Hotel acquainted us with the works of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, to whom Anderson dedicates the film. The New Yorker has an essay examining the zigs and zags of a traveling writer using Zweig’s words…
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Where It All Began
After Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s passing last Thursday, the New Yorker opened its archives to those compelled to get their hands on something from the “voice of Latin America.” One of the more interesting pieces in the archive is “The Challenge,” in which…
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Twelve Years, One Book Later
Another testament to the tribulations of novel-making: over at the New Yorker, Akhil Sharma discusses the particular technical problems he faced while writing Family Life as well as how, exactly, he went about solving them. The book took twelve and a…
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The Works Behind the Work
Over at the New Yorker, Meg Wolitzer writes about the cultural influences that helped inform her novel The Interestings. They include Archie comics, folk music, and Michael Apted’s “Up” films”: A good chunk of what you need to know about the characters…