new yorker
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Amis, Oates, and the Foul-Smelling Meadow
Recent [WWII] novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration must be glimpsed indirectly, following Appelfeld’s admonition that “one…
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What’s Changed
Two years from now, Wonder Woman will appear in her first live action movie. But can a feminist superhero born in 1941 represent women’s issues in 2016? Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain…
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Margaret Atwood released Stone Mattress, a collection of “wonderfully weird short stories.” Stone Mattress is Atwood’s eighth collection of stories, not to mention her 14 novels and other formidable volumes of poetry, children’s literature, and nonfiction. Reviewers across the…
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A Sentimental Translation
Although A Sentimental Novel, the final work from Alain Robbe-Grillet, was published in French in 2008, the English translation didn’t follow for almost another four years. Partially, this was due to the book’s content: a lengthy series of Robbe-Grillet’s sadistic fantasies.…
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Laugh Track
Inconceivably, unexplainably, and, inevitably, thankfully, Bill Cosby’s on tour again. But even off-stage, he’s been there all his life: In 1976, Cosby earned a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, after writing a dissertation about whether teachers found…
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Lost Language Explored
The literature of Alzheimer’s is a cavern unexplored, but Stefan Merrill Block does his best for the New Yorker: Nearly every novel I’ve read that attempts to depict the internal experience of Alzheimer’s also attempts to fit the disease’s retrogenic…
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Memoir vs. Status Updates
In an era when people live tweet every aspect of their lives, the memoir might seem an antiquated notion. Dani Shapiro disagrees. Status updates are immediate, instant acts of narcissism. Writing a memoir requires introspection and distance. Shapiro explains over…
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The Post-Wounded Woman
Leslie Jamison‘s The Empathy Exams coins the phrase “Post-Wounded Woman,” referring to women who “are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much.”…
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My Life In Books Besides Middlemarch
Looking back on her reading life in her late teens, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead discusses the “flawed and pernicious division” between books read for pleasure and books read “because we have to,” because they’re part of the established literary…
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Thinking About Tweeting About Working on My Novel
Artist Cory Arcangel recently curated a collection of tweets containing the phrase “working on my novel” to produce a book of the same name. The New Yorker’s Mark O’Connell wonders why—why he did it, why they tweeted it, and why…
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Seeing Literature
In the New Yorker, Peter Mendelsund talks about designing book covers for iconic works of literature. The thing that surprised me was how dogmatic people were. They felt that when they read a book they loved, they saw every aspect…
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From the Limousine, the King of Funk
We want the intent. Whatever happened basically to the ethnic man, it happened through trials and tribulations. There’s no intent to make them better. Martin Luther King—and Black Panthers organized to start riots. SNCC—the hate groups, whether it was the…