the new yorker
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This Year in Literature and Gender
Matters of gender and sexuality come to the surface repeatedly in the scuffles discussed in The New Yorker piece called “Literary Feuds of 2013.” In the past year, there have been debates over the double standard to which the personalities…
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Rockwell and the Law of Opposites
In the New Yorker, Lee Siegel sheds light on the oft-seen contradiction between artists and their art in her review of Deborah Solomon’s biography “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell.” In contrast to his idealized paintings of…
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Soil into Poetry
This is what writers do–we keep each other warm–during periods of solitude when we are writing. Henri Cole eulogizes his friend James Lord in a piece in The New Yorker, and takes a look at the power of writing to…
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Women Speaking Up
For Slate, Amanda Hess reports on a boom in the publication of personal essays about women’s issues like rape, abortion, or an eye-poppingly grotesque parasite infection that we’d rather remain ignorant of: These stories are emotionally electric, politically relevant, and powerfully…
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The Copycat Lolita
A few weeks before Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita came out, the New Yorker published a short story about a man consorting with a young woman named Lolita instead of her mother—but this story was by Dorothy Parker, whose career was entering its last-gasp…
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A Story Unfolds in the Marginalia
After finding a paperback novel strewn on an airport bench with the note: “To whomever finds this book—please read it, take it somewhere, and leave it for someone else to find it” written inside, J.J. Abrams became fascinated with the…
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Twain’s Longest Dictation
In the New Yorker, Ben Tarnoff reviews Volume II of the Autobiography of Mark Twain. Notorious for his ability to talk a blue streak, Twain dictated the entire three-volume tome of over 5000 typewritten pages while lying in bed awaiting,…
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Love at First Sight
It seems counterintuitive to say the least, but there were 100 takes filmed of the love-at-first-sight scene in Blue Is the Warmest Color, the French film that has garnered attention for its 10-minute lesbian sex scene, an epic length for…
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With Child in Mongolia
Writer Ariel Levy offers a heart-wrenching account of adventure and coming into motherhood in her essay called “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” featured in The New Yorker. People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased…
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“A Writer’s Writer”
John Williams’ Stoner has unexpectedly become a bestseller in Europe, but the work remains largely unknown in its own country. In “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of,” New Yorker contributor Tim Kreider explores the reasons why Williams has been…
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A Wild Excerpt from White Girls
Guernica has a lengthy excerpt up from White Girls, the genre-warping new collection of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and who knows what else by the New Yorker‘s Hilton Als. It’s complex, challenging, and completely, enthrallingly beautiful, so it’s impossible to choose…
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WRITING AS A KIND OF WAKING DREAM
The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don’t know and find something out. In his recent essay featured in The New Yorker, writer T. Coraghessan Boyle discusses the act of…