the new yorker
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Pinsky’s DOS Days
Over at the New Yorker, James Reith discusses Mindwheel, a text adventure game written by US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky back in the 80s. Once thought the future of fiction, the “interactive novel” now stands as a delightful curiosity you…
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War and Peace at the American University
At American universities, administrative bureaucracies too often deny students a voice in their own education; for the New Yorker, Jennifer Wilson puts a spotlight on the opposite extreme. Tolstoy College was founded at SUNY Buffalo in the late 60s as…
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But Is It Dangerous?
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has recently become legal to publish and sell in Germany for the first time since World War II. What place does this volume hold in our collective world history? And should it be regarded as a…
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A Faithful and Fortifying Humanism
James Woods profiles poet Yehuda Amichai for the New Yorker. Woods suggests that although Amichai is “bound up with contemporary Israeli life,” his “faithful and fortifying humanism” makes his work relevant on a global scale.
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In Plain Sight: The Vanishing of Ellen Bass
Putting her experiences into a broader context, [Bass] now saw, was essential to “creating openings for readers to enter her poems and for the poems to enter her readers.”
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For Everybody
…you ask them, ‘Why are you so upset?’, and they can’t answer you. For the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphael talks to linguist David Crystal about our age of abbreviation.
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Language and Exile
Over at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri has written a hauntingly beautiful personal essay about learning Italian, leaving English, and finding her voice in linguistic exile: How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine?…
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The New Yorker Novella
[T]he long short story/novella is a fantastic medium for story, one that is uniquely suited to the online platform. The New Yorker has begun a new online series, New Yorker Novella, to be comprised of novellas the magazine wasn’t “able to…
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From Being Definite to Indefinite
There is a vanishing point in our humanity, a point at which the other goes from being definite to indefinite. But this point is also the locus for the opposite movement, in which the other goes from indefinite to definite—and…
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A Dark and Stormy Dystopia
For the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz analyzes “meteorological activity in fiction,” and how recent questions about climate change has led to a reemergence of weather related fiction, particularly in dystopian works: Our earliest stories about the weather concerned beginnings and endings. What…
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That Thought and Nothing Else
If you’re still waiting for the Muse to show up, look behind you—it might be driving the other direction. Ann Beattie tells the New Yorker how a bumper sticker inspired her story, “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowgirl”: I thought,…
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The Rumpus Interview with Marian Thurm
Prolific author Marian Thurm talks about her new collection of stories, Today is Not Your Day, being a true New Yorker, and the importance of sympathetic characters.