the new yorker
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Riding the Underground
The Underground Railroad has always fascinated Americans, and recently it has exploded in popularity, with books, TV shows, and even representation on United States currency. But does the mythologized version of the Underground Railroad live up to actual history? In a recent New…
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“The Way We Thought We Would Be Interested”
For the New Yorker, James Wood praises Joy Williams’s oblique precision: In Williams’s world, we are all wandering interlopers—adrift, trapped, groundless—looking for visitors’ privileges.
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Learning and Loving in French
Supposedly, the best way to master a foreign language is to fall in love with a native speaker. Language, in delineating a boundary that can be transgressed, is full of romantic potential. … If first languages are reservoirs of emotion,…
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Wealth and the American Dream
Two recent novels, The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel, explore privilege and entitlement, and what happens when wealth disappears. It can be hard to feel sorry for trust fund kids…
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Don’t Forget the Bunting
If Basil Bunting were not remembered for “Briggflatts”—his longest and best poem, first published fifty years ago—he might still be remembered as the protagonist of a preposterously eventful twentieth-century life. Poet Basil Bunting had an unconventional life full of interesting journeys…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Irish author Danielle McLaughlin didn’t start writing fiction until 2010, but in the years since she has amassed an impressive collection of writing awards, including the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition, and has twice placed stories in the New Yorker.…
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Raw Material
Our VW van had a Porsche engine, other modifications that made it good for tough Mexican roads. Gorgeous photographs accompany Lucia Berlin’s own account, with an introduction by Cressida Leyshon, of her travels in Mexico, drugs, and family life. Memories…
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Women and Workplace Fiction
Over at the New Yorker, Lydia Kiesling writes about workplace fiction, typically seen as a male-centric dominion overseen by writers like Kafka, as written by women from Helen Phillips in The Beautiful Bureaucrat to Terry McMillan in How Stella Got…
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Captain of My Soul
For the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv profiles philosopher Martha Nussbaum: Like Narcissus, she says, philosophy falls in love with its own image and drowns.
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At Heaven’s Gates
At the New Yorker, Richard Brody shares a eulogy for director Michael Cimino: Cimino’s life work is a cinema of mourning, an art of grief, a nightmare of memory that finds its sole redemption in ecstasy—the heightened perception that transforms experience into a…
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Tell Me about Yourself
Do you love this shit? Are you high right now? Do you ever get nervous? Quizzes are everywhere these days, from meandering author interviews to hard-hitting investigations to exactly which Disney princess corresponds to your introverted spirit animal. Read about the…
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Trump Alchemy Examined
“Get more, that inner music seems to be telling him. Get, finally, enough. Refute a lifetime of critics. Create a pile of unprecedented testimonials, attendance receipts, polling numbers, and pundit gasps that will, once and for all, prove—what?” George Saunders patrols the Trump campaign trail and…