new yorker
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What’s So Great about Relatability?
In the wake of a tweet by Ira Glass that called Shakespeare’s plays unrelatable, Rebecca Mead explores why we care so much about whether we can relate to a play, story or work of art. She admits there’s nothing new about people wanting to see…
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Poetry and a Son’s Death
Finding a way to grieve for the passing of a child is a complicated matter. Poet Edward Hirsch lost his son in 2011, and has just completed a 76-page elegy that will be published in September titled Gabriel. Alec Wilkinson goes…
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What Twitter Could Mean for Fiction
Following the publication of David Mitchell’s short story “The Right Sort” on Twitter last week, Ian Crouch considers the possibilities and limitations of the medium for fiction. He admires some of Mitchell’s tweets, wonders if the story isn’t actually better read…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Let’s dedicate this week to the publications, editors, and benevolent marketing gurus who unleashed a whole bunch of quality FREE short fiction to us. Under the shadow of the FCC’s impending decision as to whether or not net neutrality will…
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The Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge
The Baffler has a newly designed website, which includes all of its 25 issues, available for free. With so much talk about the New Yorker opening its digital gates this summer, let’s not forget “the Journal that Blunts the Cutting…
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Gateway Literature
Over at the New Yorker, Stephen Burt reviews Ariel Schrag’s Adam, a graphic novel about a straight man who finds himself in the midst of New York’s queer scene. Almost as interesting as the novel’s contents is its publicity: where trans…
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How to Read Online and Still Understand Things
This New Yorker article sums up some recent thinking on the psychological effects of online reading. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address…
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Rent-a-Man
Find here at the New Yorker a short history of Ted Peckham, an entrepreneur in the first half of the last century known for his male escort service, indicted for the possibilities it opened up. The escort “would have to remain…
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Fitbitting
Diligent exercise can be an ordeal; reading David Sedaris wax poetic on diligent exercise isn’t. Over at the New Yorker, the essayist elaborates on his Fitbit, Australian housecleaning, and the problem with keeping a routine: I look back on the…
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The Funny Side of Writing
Over at the New Yorker, read an excerpt from Mike Sacks’s upcoming Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers. The selection features an interview with George Saunders, in which the writer talks about his upbringing, getting inspiration for…
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Book of Oaths
Suzi LeVine became the first U.S. Ambassador sworn into office on a Kindle. She also took her oath of office not on the Bible, but on the U.S Constitution (open to the Nineteenth Amendment, the amendment granting women the right…
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Harvey’s Heartache
Stephen King doesn’t always write horror-less contemporary fiction, but when he does, there’s usually still a twist. Over at the New Yorker, “Harvey’s Dream” has been resurrected from the archives: Then one day you made the mistake of looking over…