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.

Friday, December 16, 2022

The End of "Bookforum"

The New York Times reports that Bookforum is ceasing publication: see “Bookforum Is Closing, Leaving Ever Fewer Publications Devoted to Books” (December 12, 2022). This is sad news. I’ve been a Bookforum subscriber for almost a decade. Christine Smallwood, Sasha Frere-Jones, Christian Lorentzen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Joanna Biggs, Frank Guan, Lauren Oyler, Gene Seymour, Alex Abramovich, Laura Kipnis, Prudence Peiffer, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Minna Zallman Proctor, Albert Moblio – just some of the many brilliant, lively, provocative critics who regularly appeared in its pages. I’m going to miss them.  

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