the new yorker
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Rereading James Baldwin
Teju Cole has a long, staggeringly (good, sharp, dynamic, crushing) essay in The New Yorker about rereading James Baldwin’s Stranger In The Village: American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It…
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This Week in Short Fiction
The news of Michael Brown’s death cannot be ignored. When one of our young people dies from shots fired by a police officer, there will be sadness and confusion. There will inevitably be questions, and questions left unanswered will lead…
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How Fitzgerald Shaped Hemingway
An early draft of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises focused on Brett Ashley, the woman who serves as a love interest to protagonist Jake Barnes and others. The revised manuscript owes much to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote a letter…
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Amazon Continues Attempts to Enlist Authors
Last week, Amazon issued an update outlining its position in the ongoing Amazon-Hachette war from a financial standpoint. While its argument that lowering e-book prices will sell more copies is certainly compelling, the New Yorker’s Vauhini Vara explains why authors…
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Roger Angell Nation
When you read Roger Angell, you can (it’s cheesy, but true!) smell clover and hear the crack of a baseball against a baseball bat. Angell is synonymous with baseball writing, and this week, he’s being inducted into the Hall of…
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Unlocking the New Yorker
Those little blue padlocks are gone for good. Starting this week, newyorker.com will release all its content to the public, free of charge, until summer’s end. Unfortunately for subscription commitment-phobes, the site will then transition to a metered paywall system…
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Struggling with Titles
Karl Ove Knausgaard has been making waves with his six-part book My Struggle. The popular series shares a title with another famous book, Mein Kampf, Hitler’s treatise written from his prison cell. The New Yorker explores the reasoning behind Knausgaard’s choice…
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A Cyclops Searches for Love in the Digital Age
In some way I think all the stories I write are love stories… Over at the New Yorker, writer Ramona Ausubel discusses “You Can Find Love Now,” her short story about a lonely cyclops who turns to the Internet in…
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Escaping Global Slavery, Almost
Njong Emmanuel Tohnain, imprisoned in a Chinese factory that produced shopping bags for Saks Fifth Avenue, wrote notes (some in English and others in French) inside five bags pleading for help from the wealthy consumers on the other side of…
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An Evolutionary Love Story
One of Karen Russell’s favorite myths is the tale of Apollo and Daphne. Read about how it inspired her short story “The Bad Graft” and how she feels about the Joshua tree, here. Without boring everybody further, I was thrilled to…
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Searching for Silence in a Crowd
Any rowdies heading to the back room of Brooklyn’s Soda Bar for some mid-week carrying-on last Wednesday night were in for a surprise. In the large, living-room-like space—ringed by a mismatched assortment of couches, cushy chairs, and coffee tables—there was…
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Almost On The Road
The New Yorker has unlocked a selection of Jack Kerouac’s journals that ran in the magazine back in 1998. Beginning with his near-completion of Town and City, and ending days after its publication, the text captures the growing pains of…