the new yorker
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A Whole Host of Western Woes
True, a marital murder-suicide does take place on the way, but it’s an act of calculated altruism, done for the good of the group. For the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz reviews Lionel Shriver’s twelfth novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047.
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The Evolution of Adrienne Rich
Over at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson marks the publication of Adrienne Rich’s collected works with an examination of the incredible arc of her life and career. And instead of condemning her many transformations as a kind of flightiness, he…
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The Vulnerability of Outsiders
Carmen Maria Machado reflects on her experience reading Lois Duncan’s novels in her youth, and explains why she continues to return to Duncan’s work to this day: Duncan has sometimes been grouped with writers like Christopher Pike or R. L. Stine,…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Karen Russell of Swamplandia! fame has a new story in The New Yorker that unearths the self-deceptions beneath what we often think is love, and also unearths a body. In “The Bog Girl,” a teenage boy named Cillian…
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The Important Queerness of Frog and Toad
At the New Yorker, Colin Stokes lauds the classic Frog and Toad’s “amphibious celebration of same-sex love” and discusses the ways in which it may have been inspired by Arnold Lobel’s life experiences: Lobel never publicly discussed a connection between the…
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Imagining the Past
Over at the New Yorker, Lucy Ives writes about how some recent works of fiction challenge conventional definitions of historical fiction by “offer[ing] a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices.” Citing works by Danielle Dutton, Marlon James, and John…
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To Collide Continually
Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. For the New Yorker, Nicola Lagioia, author of the forthcoming novel Ferocity, interviews Elena…
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Unshelf, Flip Open, Drop Out
Hua Hsu peers beneath the surface of Jesse Jarnow’s new book, a comprehensive history of LSD and the countercultural forces it inspired.
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The Great American Sermon
After all, the essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Minimalist prose. Maximalist ideas. A long tradition of anti-intellectualism. Adverbs. At the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham asks what makes an essay American?
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The Moment of Change is the Only Poem
In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. Over at the New Yorker, Claudia Rankine writes about the transformations Adrienne Rich underwent in search of ethics and the willful “I,” from the brief…
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Splain And Simple Truth
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of mansplaining, but just in case you’re not, here are some examples of ways to clarify that you’re not being patronizing. I’d be interested to hear what you think.
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Don’t Quit Your Day Job
But dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. For most of his life, Wallace Stevens worked a day job as…