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, July 30, 2021

Lizzy Harding on Decrepit Lemons and Scrotal Grapes

Deborah Griscom Passmore, Pear, Belle Angevine (1900), from An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits and Nuts (2021), edited by Ananda Pellerin

A special shout-out to Lizzy Harding for her terrific capsule review of An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts: The U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection, in the current issue of Bookforum. Sample: “The teachable moments stand out: a decrepit lemon cocooned in gray mold, mangoes with a fungal infection, a mutant Concord grape that must be described as ‘scrotal.’ ” 

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