the new yorker
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The 1906 Novel That Predicted the Future
…what makes “The Doomsman” fascinating is its vision of an abandoned New York City as “a wilderness of brick and mortar”—a land where the Financial District is ruled by owls, and where the Flatiron Building is prized primarily by archers…
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The Fossils of Storytelling
For the New Yorker, John McPhee writes about our dwindling frames of references: Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a…
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A Character By Any Other Name
Over at the New Yorker, Sam Sacks considers why “in recent years, a curious number of novelists have declined to avail themselves of that basic prerogative: naming their creations,” letting a deluge of nameless characters emerge.
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When Poets Ate Peacock
The New Yorker recalls the night that Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats met over a dinner of peacock, and examines the role of public relations in the life of a poet.
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This Week in Short Fiction
For a weekly dose of fiction, checking in at the New Yorker is probably business as usual for most, and this week it’s definitely worth scoping out Amelia Gray’s story, “Labyrinth.” It’s a story infused with Greek mythology, dark humor, and a…
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The Torch That Guided Mandela
…Nelson Mandela said to him, “You know, when I was in prison, it was you who changed the way I saw the world.” Brink believed that Mandela was “not addressing me in the singular, as an individual, but in the…
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Serial Commas, Subordinate Clauses, and the New Yorker
Mary Norris has a gift for your favorite grammarian in this week’s New Yorker: a detailed account of comma policy from a veteran copyeditor. The magazine is notorious for its meticulous house style (where else do you still see a…
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New Murakami Short Story
“Kino,” a new short story by Haruki Murakami, is available to read without the paywall over at the New Yorker.
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Where to Shelve Scripture?
At the New Yorker, Rollo Romig examines the unique position of scripture as literary genre through the lens of history, and with the help of Avi Steinberg’s recent nonfiction title The Lost Book of Mormon. Romig moves through a line of (relatively)…
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Chekov’s Journalism
For the New Yorker, Akhil Sharma discusses why Anton Chekov’s Sakhalin Island stands as the best piece of journalism produced in the nineteenth-century.
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A Literary Love Affair
Using Deidre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History as a starting point, the New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman traces our romantic love affair with books, identifying the point where reading novels stopped being mainly an intellectual activity and transformed into an emotional…
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The Unforgettable Queen
In the New Yorker, Garth Greenwell has a tribute to the Chilean writer, artist, and activist Pedro Lemebel.