Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Two New Yorker Writers Make the Times' "10 Best Books of 2022"

Hooray for two New Yorker writers – Hua Hsu and Rachel Aviv – for making The New York Times’ “The 10 Best Books of 2022”! Hsu is on the list for his memoir Stay True, part of which recently appeared in The New Yorker as “My Dad and Kurt Cobain” (August 22, 2022). Aviv is there for her Strangers To Ourselves, a study of psychological distress, part of which appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker, under the title “The Challenge of Going off Psychiatric Drugs” (April 9, 2019). Congratulations to both writers! 

Postscript: There's another book by a New Yorker writer that I'd put on that list - Ben McGrath's Riverman, based on his brilliant New Yorker piece "The Wayfarer."
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