Category
New Yorker Recycling Project
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05.16.10Publish or Perish"We have three behemoths now competing," the C.E.O. of one house said. "So one of them can't force us to do anything unless the others go along." The big piece in the April 26 New Yorker (partly because E.L. Doctorow's story is so lousy) is Ken Auletta's inside look at the e-book wars being played out between Amazon, Apple, and the big publishing houses (with Google sitting on the sidelines, waiting to pounce later this year). With the iPad for leverage, Macmillan and other publishers went up against Amazon's e-book pricing model and forced concessions that may turn out ...
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05.16.10Free Fruit for Young WidowsHe made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end. Nathan Englander's Free Fruit for Young Widows is more parable than story, sketching two acts of brutal self-preservation--one at the end of World War II, one during the Suez Crisis--and the very different reactions of two men. The characters, though, are more fully realized than is typical of a parable, and the result is a haunting story ...
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04.10.10Rat BeachFor while the warrior in me--the self-consciously ballsy kid who'd joined the Marines for the glamour and the danger--lamented not having seen action, there was another, more sensible part of myself that felt immense relief at this reprieve. And reprieve it was. For all of us knew that the invasion of Japan was in the offing, and that we'd be involved in no more feints or diversions. We'd be in the vanguard. William Styron's Rat Beach is a look inside the thoughts and emotions of a young Marine lieutenant waiting on Saipan in the summer of 1945 for the ...
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04.06.10Midnight in DostoevskyI placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was. Don DeLillo's Midnight in Dostoevsky is a nervous parable of obsession, more Kafka than Dostoevsky in its unease. It follows two college students in their efforts to construct a narrative around Ilgauskus, their mysterious Logic professor, and a nameless old man they've seen on winter walks around town. They are interested in building ...
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04.04.10ServicePlaton's haunting portfolio of portraits of sodliers and their families stood out from the September 29 2008 issue of the New Yorker. High-contrast, grainy, and haunting, they capture the trepidation of soldiers, sailors, and Marines preparing to deploy, and the grief of the families of the fallen. The photograph of Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, is especially heartrending, and out to be on the desk of everyone in Washington who has anything to do with the prosecution of our wars.
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04.04.10Hearth SurgeryFor a double issue, the December 21-28 2009 issue of the New Yorker is surprisingly thin on memorable articles. I was looking forward to Helen Simpson's "Diary of an Interesting Year," on the strength of other stories of hers I've read, but I found her grim little post-apocalyptic tale neither as dark and brooding as "The Road" nor as high-concept as "Children of Men" (the original P..D. James novel, not the violent gore-fest movie). The only piece that stuck with me was Burkhard Bilger's "Hearth Surgery, about a group of inventers and iconoclasts who are trying to solve ...
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03.24.10The LimnerMr. Tuttle was among the masters who preferred their servants to be mute, deaf, and blind—except when his convenience required the matter otherwise. Of course, masters and servants had become citizens and hired help once the juster republic had declared itself. But masters and servants did not die out; nor did the essential inclinations of man. The Limner by Julian Barnes, Jan 5 2009 Inspired by the life of John Brewster Jr., a deaf itinerant painter who made his living doing portraits of wealthy families in the early Republic, "The Limner" is a sketch of class and caste in 18th century America. ...
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03.23.10The ValetudinarianThey don't give you a manual, Meredith, and who's going to prepare you if not your grandpa? I'm not going to to pussyfooting around your bowel movements on account of your innocence, because one day you're going to wake up and wonder why the world perpetrated treacherous lies against such a perfect creature as yourself... The Valetudinarian by Joshua Ferris, August 3 2009 Joshua Ferris' story of a widower adrift in a Florida retirement community, plagued by a wide range of physical ailments, annoying neighbors, and distant children, is both a hilarious character sketch and comedic romp, and an example of Tolkein's ...
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03.23.10The Deepest DiveWhat allows a person to hold his or her breath and dive to severe depths is an autonomic process called the mammalian diing reflex, which is activated when the nerves in the face come into contact with water, most eectively with cold water. The Deepest Dive by Alec Wilkinson, August 24 2009 It's not that I disliked Dave Eggers' interpretation of "Where the Wild Things Are," which was The New Yorkerest's pick for this issue. Rather, I didn't quite see the point of it. Maurice Sendak's original picture book, which I've committed to memory since it was a favorite ...
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03.23.10War Dances"So you want to borrow a blanket from us?" the man asked. "Yeah." "Because you thought Indians would just happen to have some extra blankets lying around?" "Yeah." War Dances by Sherman Alexie, New Yorker August 10-17, 2009 Despite his feigned outrage, the man in the hospital waiting room does have blankets, "a room full of Pendleton blankets," and so the narrator's father, feet amputated because of diabetes, is afforded a small comfort. This story is all about small comforts, small moments, fathers, blankets, songs, "vodka straight up or with a nostalgia chaser," fingers in brains, bound together by that unmistakable Sherman Alexie voice. The New Yorkerest ...
