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New Yorker Recycling Project
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03.28.11Confessions of a JugglerFebruary 14 & 21, 2011: Confessions of a Juggler by Tina Fey "How do you juggle it all?" people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. "You're screwing it all up, aren't you?" their eyes say. Tina Fey's reflections on juggling motherhood and career are surprisingly warm, and (not surprisingly) funny. If that whole "30 Rock" gig falls through, I hope she starts writing the "Shouts & Murmurs" column. I was looking forward to Mary Gaitskill's story in this issue, "The Other Place." And though it was perfectly written, as you would expect, and the story of the would-be-killer on ...
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03.27.11AxisJanuary 31, 2011: Axis by Alice Munro Fortunately, Grace and Avie were both attractive. Grace was fair and stately, Avie red-haired, less voluptuous, lively, and challenging. Male members of both their families had joked that they ought to be able to nab somebody. Anton Chekhov is alive and well and living in Canada. "Axis" is a miniature novel, compressing four lives into a few pages and a handful of critical moments; this is short fiction at its best.
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03.27.11New Yorker Recycling Project: another roundupI'm clearing out some more of the stack of New Yorkers that always seem to get way ahead of me, and in the spirit of The New Yorkerest noting the best pieces. If you should happen to run into one of these issues in a waiting room, these are the can't-miss stories and articles. March 7, 2011 Backbone by David Foster WallaceNor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal ...
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12.12.10A Widow’s StoryForever after, you will recognize those places--previously invisible, indiscernible--where memory pools accumulate. All the waiting areas of hospitals, hospital rooms, and, in particular, those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places, where memory pools lie underfoot, as treacherous as acid.A Widow's Story by Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker December 13, 2010 I have to admit, I'm not a huge Joyce Carol Oates fan. Maybe it's the sheer volume of her output, or the way she seems to insist on having her say on the latest trend ...
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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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