the new yorker
-
The Other World
This ain’t your grandma’s boozy brunch. Stephie Gorton Murphy joins dark deity Cthulu for breakfast at NecromiCon Providence: The gathering had the buoyant atmosphere brought about when people who know each other as online avatars finally share a physical space—and…
-
Sex and Selfhood
At the New Yorker, Garth Greenwell looks at the vivid sex scenes of Lidia Yuknavitch: Yuknavitch’s sex scenes are remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of…
-
Deep Pain and Deep Beauty
Deep pain and deep beauty oscillate throughout Sagawa’s work, often triggered in the same image. “Insects pierce green through the orchard,” she writes in “Like a Cloud.” “The sky has countless scars. The skin of the earth emerges there, burning…
-
Joan Didion: Conservative to Liberal
How exactly did Joan Didion go from writing for conservative weekly the National Review to serving as a leading voice for the left? The New Yorker offers an answer: What changed was her understanding of where dropouts come from, of why people turn…
-
The Strange Life and Literature of Lucia Berlin
We have, most of us, known at least some part of what she went through: children in trouble, or early molestation, or a rapturous love affair, struggles with addiction, a difficult illness or disability, an unexpected bond with a sibling,…
-
Who Watches the Watchmen (and Women)?
The New Yorker looks at books that examine the blurry lines around intolerance, political correctness, and free speech. The authors ask if the very people policing intolerance and hate speech are themselves being intolerant and stifling free speech: [The authors] argue…
-
On Writing and Garlic
Welcoming Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, a new collection of Shirley Jackson’s writings out today from Random House, the New Yorker offers a three-installment series of lectures on writing by the seminal author excerpted from the book: “Memory…
-
Writing the Oral History of Our Time
Nearly everything Gould ever held in his hands slipped away. He lost his glasses; he lost his teeth. “I keep losing fountain pens, change, and even manuscripts,” he wrote. “I lost my diary in the toilet,” he reported one day.…
-
Fitzgerald Bought Into Ethnic Stereotypes
F. Scott Fitzgerald may have written beautifully about the Jazz Age, but he had some problems with people of different races and backgrounds, and wrote some rather awful things about black people (and the French). But, argues Arthur Krystal at The New…
-
Getting Lost at The Strand
New York City’s The Strand bookstore is one of the world’s great literary institutions. For literary pilgrims, The Strand is a destination akin to Shakespeare and Company in Paris or Powell’s in Portland. Now, The Strand is modernizing. Many of its…
-
The Alternate Careers and Future Projects of Alejandro Zambra
[Soccer] games on the radio are absolutely like literature—the metaphors, the pacing, the need for an evolving style. You can’t always say the same thing. The role of the play-by-play announcer seems much more interesting to me than that of…
-
Literary Food Porn
The joy of reading about the meals of others shows that, in many ways, we are simple creatures: by merely looking upon someone else eating we can feel better fed. Over at the New Yorker, Bee Wilson contemplates why reading…