new yorker
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The Work That Remains to Be Done
“I keep trying to imagine a universe in which too many public figures declaring themselves feminists would be a bad thing,” Roxane Gay, the novelist and the author of an essay collection entitled “Bad Feminist,” wrote, before concluding, “Of all…
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The Id’s Id
If the id had an id, and it wrote poetry, the results might sound like “Widening Income Inequality,” Frederick Seidel’s sixteenth collection. The New Yorker examines the poetry (and unabashed privilege) of Frederick Seidel.
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First Comes Love…
Over at the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman explores how men and women authors write about marriage. Citing examples from Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, and many others, Waldman writes: Ideas about love, about its essential nature and…
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Insincerity and False Candor
For the New Yorker, David Denby listens to Jane Austen’s Emma and reflects on how listening to the book highlights the insincerity of the its characters: Austen was one of the first modern writers, one of the first thoroughly to understand the unconscious…
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Tropical Islands of Privilege
Over at the New Yorker, Ottessa Moshfegh has a new short story, “The Beach Boy.” Moshfegh also sat down with Deborah Treisman to talk further about her writing: Isn’t it hilarious when people are blind to their own arrogance? For some, no amount of…
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Reporting as Literature
Reporter and writer Svetlana Alexievich recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. In a piece for the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch brings up some questions that this poses about the relationship between reportage literature and other forms—is one more necessary or relevant in…
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Canonized Outrage
Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it? Kenneth Goldsmith has long been a figure of tension in the literary community: at once a savior for the conceptual intellectualists and avant-garde, and a malicious clown bent on provocation…
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High-Priced Higher Education
Another school year has begun leading to age old questions like: is this degree worth it? The New Yorker takes a look at college degrees and how over the last century, the liberal arts degree that once served as a…
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Litmags Prevail
Once your journal exists, it will wing its way into a world already full of journals, like a paper airplane into a recycling bin, or onto a Web already crowded with literary sites. Why would you do such a thing?…
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The Other Elizabeth Taylor
Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini. The New Yorker profiles Elizabeth Taylor (the famed novelist,…
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Dante for Days
All of Italy, it seems, is gearing up for a serious, extended celebration in honor of the 750th birthday of the beloved poet Dante Alighieri. John Kleiner writes for the New Yorker about the festivities and the country’s intense relationship…
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Life, Death, and Jokes
When I drew my last breath, no one saw me. The car that hit me drove quickly away, and a driver stopped to carry me out of the center of the road. I was already dead when he carried me,…