new yorker
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In Defense of The Novel
For the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman responds to David Shields’s Reality Hunger, primarily using Anna Karenina to defend the powers of the novel.
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Practical Sobs
At the New Yorker, Leslie Jamison interviews Charles D’ambrosio; they touch on narrative omniscience, the impossibility of achieving it, and just what it is that makes for a wonderful essay: Most of the time I think of the self as…
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Late Bloomer
At the New Yorker, James Wood reviews Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, an English writer who emerged on the scene at sixty-one: The story that Lee’s book tells (or tries to tell, because much evidence has been obscured or…
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The Lower Forty-Eight
Dave Eggers has a new story up at the New Yorker: There is proud happiness, happiness born of doing admirable things in the light of day, years of good work, and afterward being tired and content and surrounded by family…
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Standing Ovation
Over at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh gives Chris Rock the profile treatment. Sanneh touches on the business of comedy, dueling aesthetics, and the trouble with staying relevant in an age of irrelevance: On set, whenever someone complimented Rock’s performance…
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The Rules are There
In his new book The Sense of Style, brain scientist Steven Pinker calls for a relaxation of English grammar rules. While the Daily Beast’s review praises Pinker for rejecting the false dichotomy between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, the New Yorker…
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This Week in Short Fiction
It’s that time of year where we’re all craving a good scary story, be it told by candle light, on a screen, or in a book. Neil Gaiman’s middle-reader graphic novel Hansel and Gretel came out on Tuesday of this…
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The History of the Chapter
Books have been written or arranged in chapters for over two millennia now, although that fact has never received the attention it deserves from historians of the written word. Perhaps the sheer longevity of the concept has rendered it invisible.…
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An Inconvenient Fiction
Invoking his new play, Buzz, Benjamin Kunkel writes in the New Yorker about how “few imaginative writers have dealt with the present-day experience of global warming in a direct and concentrated way” and why this might be the case: If…
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Skewed Standards
The YA battle rages on at Flavorwire, where Sarah Seltzer responds to Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker essay pondering the effects of supposedly lowbrow children’s lit: We have to interrogate our basic assumption that writing skills possessed by educated white people…
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Word of the Day: Pneumatophony
(n.); the utterance of articulate sounds by a ghost or a spirit “Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He’s gotta pick this one. He’s got to. I don’t…
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Hasta la Madre
At the New Yorker, Francisco Goldman tackles the malaise shadowing his favorite city in the world: Mexico City feels different these days. Its usual vibrancy has been muted, and not only because of the missing students of Ayotzinapa. Paéz tells me that…