10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #6 Joanna Biggs' "Sylvia"

Sylvia Plath, letter to Aurelia Plath, November 22, 1962

This is the fifth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Joanna Biggs’ brilliant “Sylvia.” It first appeared in the December 20, 2018, London Review of Books under the title “ ‘I’m an intelligence.’ ” A revised version called “Sylvia” is included in Biggs’ excellent 2023 A Life of One’s Own. That's the one I’ll consider here. 

“Sylvia” is a review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vols. I & II (edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil). It’s one of the most passionate, intensely personal book reviews I’ve ever read. Biggs uses Plath’s life and work to understand her own life. And she uses her own life to understand Plath’s life and work. Her identification with Plath is near total. It began when she was seventeen:

At seventeen, she had told her journal: “I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’ ” And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. I’m sure this is one of the things I found liberating about her when I was seventeen, that she wanted so much and so baldly, so unashamedly. I looked at my own depressed English coastal town, and I wanted more, and didn’t want to feel so guilty about it. Plath’s ambition, though it was stranger and wilder and more antique than mine, legitimized the things I wanted. I uselessly longed and hoped and wrote instead of dating, writing fiction and applying for summer schools. I didn’t think I was allowed to live the life of a writer, although that was what I wanted. Who did I think I was? I should aim for something I could get. But in reach were things I didn’t want. My longing was punctuated with bursts of desire that lasted long enough to complete the form for Oxford. In those moments, I had some Plath in me. I wasn’t waiting for permission that would never come.

Biggs also remembers feeling at seventeen that “I was liking something it was a cliché for me to like. I thought she was for girls like me who were told that they thought too much, who scribbled their feelings in a spiral-bound notebook they hid in the drawer of their bedside table. As well as a reminder that being like that was dangerous.” 

Why dangerous? Because Plath’s life is psychologically fragile, and her attempts to deal with it “take her to one mental hospital after another, one psychiatrist after another, and finally to the electroshock chamber, where they grease her temples and let blue volts fly.” Biggs reports that on August 24, 1953, Plath attempted suicide “and was found barely alive, two days later.” 

Plath recovers. The following summer finds her on the beach at Cape Cod. This, for Biggs, is a key moment in Plath’s life. She calls it Plath’s Platinum Phoenix Summer: “blonde hair, red lipstick, and white bikini on creamy Massachusetts sand, alive when she could have been dead.” There’s a photo from that summer, showing Plath and her boyfriend Gordon Lameyer walking the beach. It figures centrally in Biggs’ piece:

In summer 2021, Plath’s daughter Frieda put a tranche of her mother’s possessions up for auction, including the tarot deck Ted gave Sylvia, their love letters, and their wedding rings. I was tempted by nothing – those are charged objects – apart from one thing: a snap from July 1954, right in the middle of the Platinum Summer. It is mostly of the sea and sky, but Sylvia is in the bottom left corner, smiling out of her blonde bob. She is walking toward Gordon in a halter-neck, high-waisted white bikini, and her left hand swings out loose. She really does look happy. I planned to frame it in white wood under conservation glass and hang it above my desk. Rise again, rise again, rise again. And I bid on it, and even seemed to be winning on my own birthday in July. I don’t know that I’m sad, really, to have lost it (it went for multiples of what I could afford) but I know that if I was ever guardian of a part of Plath’s life, it would be something from that summer, that Platinum Phoenix Summer. 

“Rise again” echoes through Biggs’ piece. She says it when she describes her return to Plath’s writing after her own marriage ends: “This time around, her efforts to rise again seemed clearer to me.” And she says it regarding Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, and Ariel, the collection of poems she completed before her death: they are “as much about rising again as they are about oblivion.” 

For me, the most absorbing part of Biggs’ intricate review is her analysis of the Plath-Hughes relationship. It begins, “When she meets Ted – which is not the same as saying it is his fault – her death comes into view.” She calls the marriage “fusional”: “Theirs was a fusional marriage: emotionally, physically, editorially.” She says, “They were mutually nurturing in their shoptalk, on which we can eavesdrop in the letters.” She says that Hughes’s affair shattered Plath’s idea of herself. But she also says this:

With the blow came exhilaration, and electroshock The Bell Jar-era imagery: “It broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. I feel elated.”

Biggs mirrors off the Plath-Hughes break-up. She writes, “The idea of a shared life, a place I could live, where I would be believed in and valued, crumbled. After twelve years together, my marriage was over in less than a year of raising the questions. I was thirty-four, stunned and exultant.” She says, “During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary? Sylvia’s late poems suggest: always both.”

Biggs quotes Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and says,

The Lazarene woman is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi slaughter, a sinner-survivor of Lucifer’s fire, but mostly I like to think of Sylvia steeling herself against coming face to face with her rival, her ex, and all the gossipers, with the drumbeat of these fuck-you lines in her head: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” 

Biggs’ piece ends unforgettably. She imagines that Plath still lives. She imagines meeting her:

I sometimes like to imagine that Sylvia Plath didn’t die at all: she survived the winter of 1963 and she still lives in Fitzroy Road, having bought the whole building on the profits of The Bell Jar and Doubletake, her 1964 novel about “a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter & philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect.” She wears a lot of Eileen Fisher and sits in an armchair at the edge of Faber parties, still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet. She is baffled by but interested in #MeToo. She still speaks Boston-nasally, but with rounded English vowels. She stopped writing novels years ago, and writes her poems slowly now she has the Pulitzer, and the Booker, and the Nobel. She is too grand to approach, but while she’s combing her white hair and you’re putting on your lipstick in the loos, you smile at her shyly in the mirror and she says: “What are you looking at?”

That “still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet” is inspired! The whole essay is inspired – one of the most creative critical pieces I’ve ever read.  

On the Horizon: T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style

I want to consider T. J. Clark’s style. It’s one of the most distinctive, delectable styles I’ve ever read. What makes it so? What are its constituent elements? How does it work? Why do I love it? Each month over the next twelve months, I’ll pick a favorite passage from Clark’s work and attempt to analyze it. A new series then – “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style” – starting January 22, 2025.

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: John McPhee's "The Pine Barrens"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967); Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998); and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of The Pine Barrens. 

This great book first appeared in The New Yorker, in two installments (November 25 & December 2, 1967). It’s an immersive portrait of an enormous tract of New Jersey wilderness called the Pine Barrens. “New Jersey wilderness” may seem like an oxymoron. New Jersey, as McPhee points out, has “the greatest population density of any state in the Union. In parts of northern New Jersey, there are as many as forty thousand people per square mile.” Whereas, “in the central area of the Pine Barrens – the forest land that is still so undeveloped that it can be called wilderness – there are only fifteen people per square mile.”

The Pine Barrens is an incongruity. It is six hundred and fifty thousand acres of wilderness – “nearly as large as Yosemite National Park,” says McPhee – abutting one of the most massive transportation corridors in the world (“The corridor is one great compression of industrial shapes, industrial sounds, industrial air, and thousands and thousands of houses webbing over the spaces between the factories”). Yet, inside the Pine Barrens, you’d never know such intensive development existed. It’s a distinct and separate world. Here, from the book’s superb opening paragraph, is McPhee’s description of it:

From the fire tower on Bear Swamp Hill, in Washington Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, the view usually extends about twelve miles. To the north, forest land reaches to the horizon. The trees are mainly oaks and pines, and the pines predominate. Occasionally, there are long, dark, serrated stands of Atlantic white cedars, so tall and so closely set that they seem to be spread against the sky on the ridges of hills, when in fact they grow along streams that flow through the forest. To the east, the view is similar, and few people who are not native to the region can discern essential differences from the high cabin of the fire tower, even though one difference is that huge areas out in this direction are covered with dwarf forests, where man can stand among the trees and see for miles over the uppermost branches. To the south, the view is twice broken slightly – by a lake and by a cranberry bog – but otherwise it, too, goes to the horizon in forest. To the west, pines, oaks, and cedars continue all the way, and the western horizon includes the summit of another hill – Apple Pie Hill – and the outline of another fire tower, from which the view three hundred and sixty degrees around is virtually the same view from Bear Swamp Hill, where, in a moment’s sweeping glance, a person can see hundreds of square miles of wilderness. 

McPhee spent about eight months roaming the Pine Barrens, driving its sand roads, canoeing its rivers, visiting forest towns, talking with woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store – logging impressions as he went. Here are some of the things he noted:

There is no white water in any of these rivers, but they move along fairly rapidly; they are so tortuous that every hundred yards or so brings a new scene – often one that is reminiscent of canoeing country in the northern states and in Canada.

The characteristic color of the water in the streams is the color of tea – a phenomenon, often called “cedar water,” that is familiar in the Adirondacks, as in many other places where tannins and other organic waste from riparian cedar trees combine with iron from the ground water to give the rivers a deep color.

It is possible to drive all day on the sand roads, and more than halfway across the state, but most people need to stop fairly often to study the topographic maps, for the roads sometimes come together in fantastic ganglia, and even when they are straight and apparently uncomplicated they constantly fork, presenting unclear choices between the main chance and culs-de-sac, of which there are many hundreds.

When I first stopped in there [Chatsworth General Store], I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a well shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter.

The Rubel blueberry was named for Charlie Leek’s uncle Rube Leek. The Stanley was named for Charlie’s older brother. Both varieties are grown in the blueberry patch where Charlie is foreman. He told me this in his pick-up truck on the way out there from Buzby’s store.

A remarkably common cause of fire in the pines is arson. Standing in all that dry sand, the forest glistens with oils and resins that – to some people – seem to beg for flame. Oak leaves in forests that are damp and rich are different from Pine Barrens oak leaves, which have so much protective oil concentrated within them that they appear to be made of shining green leather.

Twenty-three kinds of orchids grow in the Pine Barrens – including the green wood orchid, the yellow-crested orchid, the white-fringed orchid, the white arethusa, the rose pogonia, and the helleborine – and they are only the beginning of a floral wherewithal that botanists deeply fear they will someday lose.

One summer morning, in a place called Hog Wallow, near the center of the Pine Barrens, McPhee stops at a house to ask for water. Here he meets one of the book’s key figures – Fred Brown. McPhee describes the encounter:

Fred Brown’s house is on an unpaved road that curves along the edge of a wide cranberry bog. What attracted me to it was the pump that stands in his yard. It was something of a wonder that I noticed the pump, because there were, among other things, eight automobiles in the yard, two of them on their sides and one of them upside down, all ten years old or older. Around the cars were old refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, partly dismantled radios, cathode-ray tubes, a short wooden ski, a large wooden mallet, dozens of cranberry picker’s boxes, many tires, an orange crate dated 1946, a cord or so of firewood, mandolins, engine heads, and maybe a thousand other things. The house itself, two stories high, was covered with tarpaper that was peeling away in some places, revealing its original shingles, made of Atlantic white cedar from the stream courses of the surrounding forest. I called out to ask if anyone was home, and a voice inside called back, “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in.”

And with that, one of the all-time great McPhee “characters” enters the narrative. In the weeks that follow, McPhee stops in many times to see Fred. He takes Fred with him on several of his drives through the pines. Fred, who is seventy-nine, brims with local knowledge, and is “expansively talkative.” McPhee writes, “As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles.” 

I love that “picking fragments of the past out of the forest.” It’s exactly what McPhee does in this book. He visits the sites of vanished iron towns, forge towns, jug taverns, ruins of old factories, and describes what’s there, and what used to be there. Here, for example, is his depiction of the furnace town of Martha, then and now:

Martha Furnace was built in 1793, a few miles southeast of Jenkins. The furnace has long since collapsed, and a large earth-covered mound remains where a high double-walled pyramid of bricks once stood. The spillway runs back to a broken dam on the Oswego River at Martha Pond. There were about fifty houses in the town, a central mansion, a school, and a small hospital – all interspersed with stands of catalpa trees, which were planted throughout the town and are about all that remains of it. With the exception of the furnace mound, there is not a trace of a structure in Martha now. The streets are bestrewn with green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing the difference from the surrounding woodland.

The Pine Barrens seems to tell a story about place that reverses the usual process of land taken, exploited, and destroyed by human development. In the Pine Barrens, nature appears to win the ecological war, with towns and factories in ruins, absorbed back into the ground. But that’s not the way the book ends. It ends ominously, with a planner showing McPhee his vision of the Pine Barrens as the location of a new city and jetport. McPhee concludes that, without legislative protection, the Pine Barrens is headed for extinction. 

In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of The Pine Barrens, including its action, structure, description, sense of place, and point of view. But first I want to introduce the second book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands. 

2024 Year in Review

Let’s begin with a drink, shall we? How about one of those 1884 Martinis that Gary Shteyngart writes about in his “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024). What a dazzling piece! Great subject, exquisite style. Definitely my favorite piece of 2024. Here’s Shteyngart’s description of the 1884 Martini:

This beast is premade with two types of gin—Boatyard Double Gin, from Northern Ireland, and the New York Distilling Company’s Perry’s Tot Navy Strength Gin—which clocks in at a ridiculous 114 proof. This dangerous concoction is then fat-washed with Spanish Arbequina olive oil, after which it is frozen and the olive oil’s fat removed, while vermouth, lemon liqueur, a house-made vetiver tincture, and a few dashes of lemon-pepper bitters are added. A lemon peel is then showily expressed over the glass tableside and a very briny Gordal olive and a cocktail-onion skewer are plopped in.

Yes, I’ll have one of those, please. Mm, that is beastly! Okay, let’s roll!

Highlight #1: The 2024 Food Issue. This digital-only issue is crammed with delectable writing, including Shteyngart’s brilliant “Martini tour” piece, Adam Iscoe’s “No Reservations,” Helen Rosner’s “Padma Lakshimi’s Funny Side,” Jiayang Fan’s “Another Chinatown,” Patricia Marx’s “Spoiler Alert,” and Hannah Goldfield’s “Holey Grail.” I love sensuous writing. The 2024 Food Issue is pure nirvana. Here’s a sample:

It was easy to see how a Courage bagel could offend, if not enrage, a New York purist. It brings to mind a rustic, crusty baguette: the exterior is dark, craggy, and heavily blistered; the crumb is a little stretchy with a lot of air holes. (Courage bagels are leavened with sourdough starter, rather than commercial yeast.) If you were to scoop it, another move for which a bagel aficionado might make a citizen’s arrest—stay safe out there!—you’d be left with mostly crust. This makes it especially suited to Courage’s main offering: photogenic open-faced sandwiches. Bagel halves are topped with various combinations of cream cheese, jewel-like slices of tomato, thin coins of cucumber, smoked salmon, roe, or sardines, then painstakingly finished with salt, freshly cracked pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, fronds of dill. A Courage bagel is a Los Angeles bagel, ready for its closeup. [Hannah Goldfield, “Holey Grail”]

Highlight #2: Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault” (April 15, 2024). Mogelson is a superb war reporter. In this riveting piece, he tells about his recent experience embedding with Ukraine’s 1st Separate Assault Battalion in Tabaivka, a settlement in north-eastern Ukraine, less than ten miles from the front line. 

Here’s an excerpt:

For the rest of the day, a steady stream of small groups of Russian infantrymen—between two and six soldiers each—walked to Tabaivka from the east. Few made it across the three-hundred-yard gap. The snow had relented, and Boyko easily stalked the groups with the surveillance drone. Perun bounded between the panel and the radio, shouting himself hoarse, calculating azimuths, and correcting the aim of his stormers, snipers, and machine gunners. It was madness: Russians kept marching down the same paths, to the same spots where their comrades had just died. One 1st Battalion machine gunner later told me he had fired his weapon so much that it had kept him warm in his frigid dugout. He couldn’t see the men he was killing. But since they kept reappearing in certain places, he memorized different branches below which he could point his barrel to hit specific coördinates up to a mile away.

Highlight #3: Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024), a meditation on becoming a parent and ending a marriage – both experiences tightly interwoven. The piece brims with thisness – “blue mesh hospital underwear,” “garbage bags full of shampoo and teething crackers,” “zipped pajamas with little dangling feet,” “diapers patterned with drawings of scrambled eggs and bacon.” Jamison is a superb describer – direct, specific, concrete. For example:

In April, I took the baby on a book tour. She was three months old. My mother came with us. Four weeks, eighteen cities. We stood at curbside baggage stands in Boston, Las Vegas, Cedar Rapids, San Francisco, Albuquerque, with our ridiculous caravan of suitcases, our bulky car seat, our portable crib. The baby in her travel stroller. The unbuckled carrier hanging loose from my waist like a second skin. Everywhere we went, I brought a handheld noise machine called a shusher. It was orange and white, and it calmed my baby down better than my own voice.

There are dozens of other quotable passages. The whole piece is quotable – a masterpiece of personal history writing. 

Highlight #4: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two.” This column is a constant source of reading pleasure. I look forward to it every week. There are two versions of it – the short version that appears in the print edition, and the longer version that is published on newyorker.com. I love comparing them. Among my favorite Rosner pieces this year are “Old John’s Diner” (“The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue”), “Le B.” (“The desserts are quite lovely, including butter-drenched crêpes Suzette, theatrically flambéed tableside, and an obscenely silky chocolate sorbet that conjures licking frosting straight from the bowl”), and “Misipasta” (“The lights are just dim enough to soothe, the tidy menu of cocktails and bitter Italian sodas ready to offer a bit of relief. The air smells like Parmigiano and butter, the sound system is playing the Pointer Sisters”).   

Highlight #5: After a six-year absence, the triumphant return of “Bar Tab.” My favorite New Yorker column is back! See, for example, Jiayang Fan, “Bar Tab: Another Country,” August 5, 2024 (“Disoriented, the pair perused the menu, he choosing C’mon Dad Gimme the Car, a tequila-forward, lip-tickling strawberry-and-jalapeño cocktail named for a Violent Femmes song, she opting for I May Destroy You, a smoky mezcal-and-Aperol number inspired by the HBO show”); Rachel Syme, “Bar Tab: So & So’s," October 14, 2024 (“One twist on a Martini features blood-red beet juice”); Ray Lipstein, “Bar Tab: “Kelly’s Tavern,” October 28, 2024 (“Here, an upside-down shot glass at your place signifies that someone has, with a timeless, Tony Soprano bravura, paid for the next of what you’re drinking”). 

Other top picks of the year:

Eric Lach, “Trash, Trash Revolution,” April 15, 2024 (“Some of the trash bags have burst open, but others are curiously intact, and you can still make out a few pieces of furniture that never got a chance to be fully digested”).

D. T. Max, “Design for Living,” May 6, 2024 (“He happily spends hours poring over blueprints, dividing former fields of cubicles into small but clever residences and reconceiving onetime copy-machine nooks as mini laundry rooms or skinny kitchens”). 

John McPhee, “Tabula Rasa, Vol. 4,” May 20, 2024 (“I work with words, I am paid by the word, I majored in English, and today I major in Wordle”).

William Finnegan, “The Long Ride,” June 10, 2024 (“Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin”).

Ian Parker, “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” June 17, 2024 (“Inside, I was surprised by the loudness of the surf—even in the dim vestibule where the aluminum Ando statue used to stand. In an empty house with no windows, the sound of the ocean filled every room. Underfoot, the original tiles had been hammered out, and so had the cables and pipes that were once embedded beneath. The floor was now rough concrete, covered in cavities and trenches, like a road that had been chewed up by a milling machine ahead of a resurfacing”).

Paige Williams, “Ghosts on the Water,” June 24, 2024 (“The men were wearing waders, hoodies, and yellow rubber gloves up to their elbows. One of them flicked on a powerful flashlight. From the bridge, I watched them traverse an inhospitable stretch of beach and climb the jagged riprap, moving toward the bridge piling where their fyke net was tethered”). 

Ian Frazier, “Paradise Bronx,” July 22, 2024 (“In another few blocks, on my right, I passed the small but excellent Bronx Museum of the Arts, where I’ve seen shows of graffiti art of the seventies and Gordon Matta-Clark’s chainsaw-cutout sections from floors and ceilings of abandoned Bronx apartment buildings—that crazy turquoise-blue kitchen linoleum!”).

Nick Paumgarten, “Dead Reckoning,” July 29, 2024 (“It’s all tightly choreographed, but the music still feels alive, improvised, viney. A not-unpropulsive jam scored a vista of the desert at night, a gesture toward the group’s 1978 trip to Egypt: a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Great Pyramids under a lunar eclipse, bats winging in the shadows of the Sphinx. Then, to the delight of the Mayerheads, a wanky “Sugaree,” under a shower of scarlet begonias”).

Ben Taub, “The Dark Time,” September 16, 2024 (“Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea”).

Anna Wiener, “Joy Ride,” September 23, 2024 (“Still, before I left, Petersen sent me around the block on a grape-purple Platypus. I cruised past the auto-body shops and a restaurant puffing anise-scented air. The Platypus was agile, and sturdy as a parade float”).

Rachel Syme, “Sniff Test,” September 23, 2024 (“The resulting perfume did not smell edible or organic; it evoked something air-gapped and untouched by human sweat, like a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy”). 

Elizabeth Kolbert, “When the Ice Melts,” October 14, 2024 (“The boardwalk curled east and then ascended a rocky ridge. From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white. The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple. The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal”).

Rivka Galchen, “Pecking Order,” October 21, 2024 (“We heard the “tea kettle tea kettle” call of a Carolina wren; it sounded like a game of marbles to me. We saw a warbling vireo, a Cape May warbler, a blackpoll warbler, and a black-and-white warbler—birds so small that it was difficult to fathom how far some of them had travelled to be there. We heard little chips that sounded like a window being cleaned; a crickety decrescendo that was not made by crickets; a sound like a trill running into a wall; a high-pitched three-fast-one-slow, like a child playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”).

Rebecca Mead, “Color Instinct,” November 18, 2024 (“Nestled in the corner of one couch is a plush panda bear, apparently well loved, its fur tinged with a rogue splash of citrine paint”).

Paige Williams, “Wild Side,” December 2, 2024 (“In the living room, Fadden found bear scat, a foot in diameter. In the kitchen, he found Miller dead. Her naked body was gashed with claw marks; her left arm and most of her right leg had been eaten down to the bone. The security bars on the window hung by a single bolt. The cabinets were destroyed. In the bedroom, Fadden saw paw prints and soil, and, on the bed, feces and urine. Miller’s laptop was still plugged in and open. Fadden wrote in his report that she appeared to have been dragged off her bed after she was already dead”).

Rivka Galchen, "Leg Work," December 16, 2024 ("According to a description of what would become known as the Ewing amputation, the surgeon makes a 'stairstep incision' over the shin using a scalpel. The relevant part of the limb is 'exsanguinated.' A flap of skin is peeled back to expose the leg muscles. Care is to be taken, the account notes, to isolate the saphenous vein and a nearby nerve. This is only the beginning of what is simultaneously a delicate, gruesome, and revolutionary surgical procedure; one of the required tools is a bone saw").

Anthony Lane, “Stirring Stuff,” December 23, 2024 (“You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done”). 

Rachel Aviv, "You Won't Get Free of It," December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 ("Trauma tends to lead to a kind of unknowing repetition, and, in the second half of her life, Alice reënacted the dynamic with her mother, in new form: she had to trade reality for fiction, her daughter for art"). 

Best “Talk of the Town”

Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan,” February 26, 2024 (“Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it”).

Ben McGrath, “Where’s My Car?,” March 4, 2024 (“In 2005, Goswick sliced his suit going through the windshield of a car that went off the old Tappan Zee Bridge”).

Ian Frazier, “Uncaged Birds,” March 4, 2024 [“Once the performance started, the cloud, which you soon forgot about, and others like it (all products, probably, of an offstage cloud-making machine), vividly captured beams of light from above the stage that came down in vertical shafts, suggesting interrogation lamps, the columns of a courthouse, or the bars of a prison cell”].

Robert Sullivan, “Find a Grave,” April 8, 2024 (“Instruments came out of the car, Morrow starting off with a reel called ‘Sligo Maid.’ Suddenly, his fiddle popped its tuning peg. ‘That’s Coleman!’ Kelly said”).

Adam Iscoe, “Catamaran,” July 1, 2024 (“The vessel, known as Energy Observer, resembled a sperm whale that had been wrapped in roughly ten thousand photovoltaic cells”).

Robert Sullivan, “From Philly to Venice,” July 1, 2024 (“The Arkestra practiced and eventually toured the world, the row house filling with gig posters, its plaster walls soaking up decades of music from a band that, under Sun Ra’s leadership, had set out on a course of inter-dimensional travel, using chords and time signatures and equations rather than rocket fuel”).

Ben McGrath, “Clean Your Pipes,” November 25, 2024 (“To a novice eye, the only clear indication that all this labor was in the service of a musical instrument was the triple-decker keyboard sitting on a table, next to some bubble wrap, on the second floor”)

Best of “The Critics”

Jackson Arn, “Tone Control,” January 29, 2024 (“I enjoy her paintings most when she makes an unlikely pair of colors scrape against each other and then smooths things over with a third. In “Greener Lean” (1978), the odd couple are a thick, too sugary green and a sickly yellow, and the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red in the lower right, which gives the yellow a little life and the green a little nuance”).

Alex Ross, “Twin Feats,” April 1, 2024 (“The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns”).

James Wood, “A Life More Ordinary,” April 8, 2024 (“Kumar’s details have the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real, as if echoing with actual family history”).

Jackson Arn, “Warp Speed,” April 22 & 29, 2024 (“Patterns unfold horizontally, but every so often a twisted pair of vertical threads (it’s called a leno weave) slashes its way out of the grid”).

Amanda Petrusich, “Age of Anxiety,” May 27, 2024 (“ ‘Lunch’ is a weird, pulsing track, vigorous and horny. It’s also my favorite song on the new album, in part because Eilish sounds incredibly free, which is to say, she sounds like herself”).

Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern,” June 3, 2024 (“At the end of the initial passage comes a solitary, exposed C: Wang rendered it with a sudden coldness, signalling the transition to the minor. Such nuances of articulation are essential to persuasive Chopin playing. The oasis of C major returns just before the coda, this time reduced to five pianissimo chords. Wang struck the first of these with a dry, plain tone; then her touch softened, so that the chords subsided into a somnolent haze. After a split-second pause, the coda exploded with concussive force”).

Hannah Goldfield, “Desert Island,” June 3, 2024 (“Inside, Villiatora serves what he calls ‘Hawaii street food’: a refined spin on a Korean-inspired plate lunch, featuring a strip of tender galbi and a meat jun, griddled golden and crisp; a spectacular fried chicken thigh shellacked in a chili-pepper-guava glaze that tastes strikingly of the juicy fruit. A dozen yards away, on the casino floor, animated bison stampede across the screens of digital slot machines, a game called Buffalo Ascension promising gold”).

Kathryn Schulz, “Casting a Line,” July 8 & 15, 2024 (“Like every brilliant author, Maclean simultaneously seems inexplicable and demands explication—some attempt to answer the questions raised by his prose. One of those questions is practical, a matter of craft: How does he do this? But another is ontological: What kind of man could make this work?”).

Maggie Doherty, “Duty Dancing,” September 9, 2024 (“Consider the first lines of ‘Churning Day’: ‘A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast, / hardened gradually on top of the four crocks.’ Each consonant cracks like a peppercorn between the teeth. These are poems you taste”).

Parul Sehgal, “The Mystery of Pain,” September 16, 2024 (“Commas are inserted casually, idiosyncratically. The language is softer, mussed, exploratory. Pain makes a mockery of control; the armor of high style is loosened”).

Jackson Arn, “Eyes Wide Shut,” September 23, 2024 (“The scene is only a few firm details away from abstraction, a Rorschach test tilted sideways—not a thing plus its echo but an unbroken flat-deep surface. If it is still an impression of a lost moment, there is something newly sturdy mixed in; each brushstroke declares, I’m still here”).

Jackson Arn, “It Takes a Village,” October 14, 2024 (“Circular handle joins with square container, apples form pert rows of three and four, individual finds perfection in collective. And look at the stems! Each points straight to Heaven, with no sign of rupture from the tree”).

Casey Cep, “Touch Wood,” December 9, 2024 (“The ‘Mack Chairs’ look, improbably, like industrial flowers: backs standing like stamens, legs curving like tendrils, seats resting on metal cruciforms as bright as tropical petals”).

Best Poem

Robert Hass, “A Sunset,” September 9, 2024 (“In the dark / I thought of a radiant ordinariness / That burned, that burned and burned”).

Best Cover

Hudson Christie, “The 2024 Food Issue”

Best Photo

Landon Nordeman’s photo for Gary Shteyngart’s "A Martini Tour of New York City" (April 24, 2024) 

Best Illustration

Bianca Bagnarelli’s illustration for Leslie Jamison’s “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best newyorker.com Post

Nathan Heller, “Helen Vendler’s Generous Mind,” April 30, 2024 (“What she had was an almost tactile understanding of the ancient practice of creating poems as art, and—running her hands like a dressmaker along the back of their stitching, watching the way they draped and moved and caught the light—she could see not only what poets did but how they did it”).

Best Paragraph

In restaurants all across the country, I shoved food into my mouth above her fuzzy head as she slept in her carrier beneath my chin. The receipts were headed to my publisher, and I was determined to eat everything: trumpet mushrooms slick with pepper jam, gnocchi gritty with crumbs of corn bread that fell onto her little closed eyes, her head tipped back against my chest. I was flustered and feral, my teeth flecked with pesto and furred with sugar. Then I pulled down my shirt and gave these meals to her. In Los Angeles, I nursed in the attic office above a bookstore lobby. In Portland, I nursed among cardboard boxes in a stockroom. In Cambridge, I nursed in a basement kitchenette beneath the public library. – Leslie Jamison, “A New Life” (January 22, 2024)

Best Sentence

Austria’s Truman vodka is shot into flaming orbit by an inventive liquor made by Empirical, the Danish distillery, and named after Stephen King’s pyrokinetic character Charlene McGee, which presents on the tongue as a flavorful burst of smoked juniper, hence the feeling that a draw of nicotine and tar can’t be far. – Gary Shteyngart, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (April 24, 2024)

Best Detail

Khan recorded voice memos of her attempts to perfect the landings on “tree” and “understand.” She touched her nose as she sang, as though she could hear through it. – Nick Paumgarten, “Misty in Manhattan” (February 26, 2024)

Thank you, New Yorker, for another great year of reading pleasure.

Credits: (1) Photo by Landon Nordeman, from Gary Shteyngart’s “A Martini Tour of New York City”; (2) Photo by Maxim Dondyuk, from Luke Mogelson’s “The Assault”; (3) Photo by Adam Whyte, from Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner”; (4) Photo by Dina Litovsky, from Eric Lach’s “Trash, Trash Revolution”; (5) Photo by Michelle Groskopf, from Nick Paumgarten’s “Dead Reckoning”; (6) Photo by Alice Mann, from Rebecca Mead’s “Color Instinct”; (7) Illustration by João Fazenda, from Robert Sullivan's "From Philly to Venice"; Illustration by Tianqi Chen, from Alex Ross’s “Thoroughly Modern.”

December 30, 2024 & January 6, 2025 Issue

Rachel Aviv, in her disturbing “You Won’t Get Free of It,” in this week’s issue, explores the complex psychosexual dynamics of Alice Munro’s family life, including the sexual abuse of her youngest daughter Andrea by her husband Gerry, and Munro's shocking decision to stay with Gerry even after Andrea told her about it. It sounds like a Munro short story, but it’s real life, with real-life consequences.  

I confess I'm struggling with my response to this piece. I'm a fan of Munro's writing. Part of me wants to defend her. Part of me realizes that what she did - "trade her daughter for art," in Aviv's words - is indefensible. I'm conflicted. "She couldn't have done it and she must have done it" - that's what Janet Malcolm said of the defendant Mazoltuv Borukhova in Iphigenia in Forest Hills. That's the way I feel right now about Alice Munro. I need more time to resolve my feelings about what she did. I may never resolve them. 

In the meantime, I'll keep an eye out for other responses to the controversy. I'd love to read Lorrie Moore on it. She admired Munro's work immensely. How is she grappling with Andrea's revelations? 

December 23, 2024 Issue

Anthony Lane writes the most perceptive, sparkling, witty, light-hearted, elegant prose. John Updike compared it to champagne. No matter what his subject, he hooks me with his opening line, and then the next one, and the next, and before I know it, I’ve read an entire essay on Lego or astronauts or John Ruskin or The Sound of Music. It's as easy as quaffing a flute of Prosecco. His piece in this week’s issue, called “Stirring Stuff,” is excellent. It’s about his love of risotto and his quest for the perfect dish of it. He visits Bottega Vini, in Verona, to observe the chefs making risotto all’Amarone:

To judge by what I saw, this is how risotto all’Amarone is summoned into being: Butter, then rice, which toasts for a short while. No onions at all. Two and a half ladles’ worth of wine, which hisses like a serpent as it hits the pan. (The chef exclaimed, “Sempre con un fuoco vivace”—“Always with a lively fire.”) Lean in close enough, inhale, and you might, if your head is weak, begin to get vaporously drunk. As the alcohol boils off, add simmering water, followed by vegetable stock. Do not be startled by the simplicity of the thing. Scrape around the sides. Remove from the stove. A dab more butter, a strewing of Parmesan, and then, unexpectedly, another glug of Amarone, too late to be steamed away. It is there to throw a punch. The result is something to behold: glossy and purplish, darker and deeper than blood. Mark Rothko would have asked for seconds.

He goes to Locarno to see a risotto-making contest:

The climax of Locarno’s celebration is a risotto-making contest, which unfolds over two days in the Piazza Grande. This is an ancient rite, dating back to the mists of 2014, and rivalries have already grown amiably intense. On Friday, August 23rd, in a vast tent, a number of restaurant chefs, backed by sweltering assistants, wrought their magic. What they conjured up was doled out to the public, who stood patiently in line, like genial descendants of the boys in “Oliver Twist,” to be given a helping in a cardboard bowl. Having scarfed down my risotto al pesto di limoni e Merlot bianco con bocconcini di pollo croccanti e pepe Vallemaggia, which took longer to say than it did to eat, I could hardly suppress a plaintive cry: “Please, signor, I want some more.”

I love his description of how risotto is made:

You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done. 

“Stirring Stuff” is a delectable tour of Lane's risotto world. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Acts of Seeing: Bombardier Snow Bus

Bombardier Snow Bus, Rankin Inlet, 2006 (Photo by John MacDougall)

I’m partial to ruins and wrecks. September 10, 2006, I was nosing around the town of Rankin Inlet on the west coast of Hudson Bay, when I encountered this rusted hulk of an old Bombardier snow bus. I love its curved shape and four round windows, golden Arctic wheat growing up around it. Most of all, I love the texture of its flayed steel skin. Flecks of yellow paint. Was that its original color? Once upon a time, it was a functioning snow bus, carrying kids to school, miners to work, researchers to field projects – who knows what it was used for? No doubt, it has a story. But I will never know it. I wonder if it’s still there.