the new yorker
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What Really Happened? We Still Don’t Know
At The New Yorker, novelist and Pulitzer Prize jury member Michael Cunningham has written a two-part essay about why there was no Prize awarded for fiction this year for the first time since 1977. The essay, while coming from a source one…
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Train Spottings
The strange confluence of affection for both literature and modes of public transportation is highlighted by The New Yorker today, in their post about the website Underground New York Public Library. The website catalogues two types of subjects: people who…
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Books for Bed
Judith Thurman and Peter Canby of The New Yorker fame talk about what they like to read at bedtime, covering ground from the Mayan apocalypse to French dictionaries to Susan Sontag. Both writer-editors, often inundated with new publications looking for…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jonah Lehrer
If you listened to Radiolab or read the New Yorker in the last three years, you’ve probably encountered the science journalist Jonah Lehrer.
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“Miss Lora”
“It was 1985. You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker. You were also convinced—like totally, utterly convinced—that the world was going to blow itself to pieces. “ This week’s New Yorker fiction…
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Slow-Motion Sins
At The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik follows up on his recent piece about America’s prisons, delving deeper into the moral issues surrounding mass incarceration. “The moral failings of advanced liberal societies, not least this one, tend to be slow-motion sins.…
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Adventures in the Narrative
Lawrence Weschler’s collection of essays, Uncanny Valley, compiles some his best essays with the same perspective that he brings to each essay – an impulse to find the subtle convergences in the mundane.
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R.I.P. Etta James
Etta James has passed away at the age of 73. The New Yorker reflects on her life and songs. The Awl pays tribute with this playlist.
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Orlean
I think the idea of what people will do in order to service something they’re obsessed with or passionate about is very much a part of both books.
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The Shortcomings of Words
Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Yorker piece, “Speechless” eloquently identifies the difficulty of finding words amidst an indescribable nightmare while remembering 9/11. “Dozens of phone calls home were placed from the towers between the moment that the first plane hit and…
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The Cartoon Grind
New Yorker cartoon space is highly coveted. Those illustrated laughs that punctuate essays are the ones that made it through the slough of rejection. It’s tough times for the gag cartoonist. Graphic novelist, James Sturn, walks us through the low…
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The Free World
In David Bezmozgis’s first novel, the Krasnansky’s, a family of Soviet émigrés, wait in Italy for permission to move to North America, the Free World referenced in the book’s title.