the new yorker
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“Dubious” Plots and “Real” Jokes
For the New Yorker, Dave Haglund reviews Louis C.K.’s stand-up special, at times pointing out the differences between crafting a comedic set and a piece of literature; at Electric Literature, Jason Diamond holds some opposite opinions.
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Reasonable Cause
The Torres family learned how Christopher died from watching the news the next day. At a press conference, the department’s chief public-safety officer said that two officers had tried to arrest Christopher at home, but, when he resisted and grabbed…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Robert Stone’s fictional universe was vast. The minds of Vietnam vets. Sailors on the open sea. Hidden romances at a prestigious university. But last weekend, one of our better explorers of the darker corners of American life was lost when…
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Who Do You Cry For?
Who do we remember and why do we mourn? Teju Cole writes about unmournable bodies for the New Yorker.
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Strange Brews
As the associate art director at Knopf, Chip Kidd’s the man when it comes to book covers. Over at the New Yorker, Ronald Kelts looks at Kidd’s latest project, Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library: Kidd designs books by James Ellroy,…
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Beach Games
For the New Yorker, David Sedaris writes about turtles, diets, and his family vacation on Emerald Isle.
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Expanding The Book Universe
For the New Yorker, Louis Menand explores how the 1939 launch of Pocket Books “transformed the culture of reading.” The mass-market paperback line was one of the first to be sold at newsstands, a method of distribution that made pulp novels…
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Reserved for the Dead and Dignified
For the New Yorker’s “Inner Worlds,” Colum McCann writes about his father’s writing shed, and Teju Cole shares his experience of watching (and rewatching) Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Red.”
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The Real Crisis
Along with the other onslaught of reactions to The New Republic’s mass resignation, George Packer offers his own response at the New Yorker, suggesting that the “collapse” (along with the recent Rolling Stone debacle) shows a “crisis” in journalism: The…
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Willful Ignorance
Over at the New Yorker, Alaksandar Hemon reads a slice of Nabokov; afterward, he chats about the foreignness of language, learning English from Pnin, and the book’s “complicated innocence” towards America.
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Deep in Don DeLillo’s Underworld
I have fairly clear recollections of writing the book—the room, the desk, the painting on the wall, the feeling that after two years of work (of an eventual four years) I now considered myself a novelist[.] Stephanie Lacava had a…