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, January 8, 2020

James Wood's "Serious Noticing"
























James Wood is one of this blog’s lodestars. Click on his name in the “Labels” list on the right and you’ll open 113 posts pertaining to his work. Yesterday, Amazon notified me that Wood’s new book Serious Noticing, which I pre-ordered November 13, 2019, is on its way. Estimated delivery date: January 20 – 24, 2020. I look forward to its arrival. Its publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, calls it “the definitive collection” of his essays. Its appearance is, for me, a significant literary event. I intend to cover it extensively. 
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