the new yorker
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So Little Has Changed
Following the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown, Edwidge Danticat reflects on the overwhelming occurrence of police brutality against people of color: Today, one might generously refer to such acts as micro-aggressions.…
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Writing After 40
If the lists are to be believed, the only good new writers are under 40. It’s not just Buzzfeed, but also the New Yorker, Granta, and others who publish lists of great new—and young—authors. Joanna Walsh takes issue with this…
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Whipping Boy
In anticipation of his memoir, Whipping Boy, Allen Kurzweil shares a condensed version at the New Yorker: his forty-year search for a boy who bullied him in a Swiss boarding school.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Story|Houston published a beautiful story this week in their Fall 2014 issue, all of which centers around the theme of family, functional or otherwise. “Termites” tells the story of Tamara, aka Tam or Tam-Tam, a youngish woman living in and…
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The Battle Rages On
At Flavorwire, Jonathan Sturgeon continues the “literary” and “genre” war, offering a new perspective grounded in the marketplace: So what’s really going on here? Well, it isn’t the genre of prose that has literary novelists anxious. It’s the market status…
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O’Connor Memorialized
Peacocks, poetry, and one of America’s most enduring authors. Upon entering the cathedral for the small induction ceremony, attendees were greeted by two gigantic, sparkling sculptures suspended from the ceiling—they are phoenixes, part of an installation by the Chinese artist…
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How Genre Can Be Useful
In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman talks about Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and how genre can be a useful tool in examining fiction: Frye’s way of thinking is especially valuable today because it recognizes that the clash of genre…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Think of the most complicated and intriguing people you have ever met. Think of the way it feels to return to those people again and again, each time finding some new facet of truth, beauty, insight, originality. Michael Cunningham’s “White…
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Nothing Left To Give
Coming across a fiftieth anniversary edition copy of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Ruth Margalit examines, for the New Yorker, the meaning of this book, especially in the context of the rest of the writer’s work: … it’s difficult to…
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New Yorker Cartoons That Aren’t Cats & Dogs
Coupled with anecdotes, Bob Eckstein has drawings of New York City bookstores (those that are “thriving,” or “shuttering,” or “just happy memories”) up at the New Yorker.
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Little Traveler
In support of his new memoir, Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart’s been touring the country. Lucky for us, he’s keeping a journal: Philip Roth, in a 2000 interview with David Remnick in the pages of this magazine, speaks about the declining number…
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Magical Thinking
When quizzed on his characters’ romantic proclivities, Haruki Murakami errs towards empathy: I occasionally think that, in our heart of hearts, we all may be seeking situations like this one—where our free will doesn’t apply and (almost) everything is determined…