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What We’re Loving: The Backwoods Bull, the Ballet, the Boot
Photo via Wikimedia Commons If you are afraid of public speaking, and ever called on to do it, I suggest that you avoid reading “The Backwoods Bull in the Boston China Shop,” from the August 1961 issue...
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Joyce Recommends the Red, and Other News
“There is jollity.” (Jollity not pictured.) Social media has warped the way we think of “sharing our stories,” but the status update hasn’t obviated the need for memoir. “I worry that we’re confusing...
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An Alphabet of Things, and Other News
Detail from Giambattista Moretti’s Alphabeta, 1737. Should the National Book Award rethink its longlist? “It’s hard to stir interest in the same subject twice, which is what the National Book Award is...
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Staff Picks: Diarists, Dowsing, Dolphin-safe Tuna
Egon Schiele, Portrait of Gertrude Schiele, 1909. In 1995, on a trip to Australia, the performance artist and writer Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark, a new-media theorist. They had a weekend-long affair...
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Now in Bloom: Our Spring Issue
The cherry blossoms on the cover of our new Spring issue augur the end of winter—even if they’re made of paper. They’re part of a portfolio by Thomas Demand, accompanied by poems from Ben Lerner. We...
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Now Online: Our Interviews with Elena Ferrante, Hilary Mantel, and Lydia Davis
Before we commence with the dog and pony show for our brand spanking new Summer issue, you should know that the three interviews from our Spring issue are now available in full online. A page from the...
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Breaking the Spell of the Centaur, and Other News
Ernst Albert Fischer-Cörlin, Nixen und Kentauren beim Bade, ca. 1932. Our Summer issue features an interview with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, “the quiet rebels of Russian translation”—now...
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Staff Picks: A Mongoose Civique and a Maestro of the Rant
Love Wins: our senior editor Stephen Hiltner designed this collage in honor of today’s Supreme Court decision.“Writing religious poetry in the twentieth century is very difficult.” So says Czeslaw...
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The Bard Blazed, and Other News
Our greatest dramatist, debilitated by the effects of cannabis at some kind of “reefer party.”Shakespeare scholars are reeling from a discovery so major, so irrefutably epochal, that it sets the entire...
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Demolishing the Literary Gynaeceum, and Other News
From the cover of The Story of the Lost Child.Elena Ferrante would like to remind you, now that her novel The Story of the Lost Child is out, that she is not a man, and that if you think she might be a...
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Press Triangle for More Information, and Other News
Camille Henrot, Guilt Tripping, 2015, three-dimensional nylon polyamide print with video and telephone components, 28 x 7 7/8 x 2 3/8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Via...
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Impressive Propaganda, and Other News
A book designed by Klaus Wittkugel on display at P! Gallery. Photo: Sebastian BachIf you’ve been holding off on reading Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels because there’s, like, four of them, and...
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How Repulsive
On the merits of disturbing literature.Frederic Leighton, Study at a Reading Desk, 1877.In a letter to a reader who was disturbed by his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke...
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Twenty Brutal Years of Tuscan Sun, and Other News
A still from the film adaptation of Under the Tuscan Sun.Because people are incorrigibly nosy, and because no one seems to find it enjoyable to let an author write her books in peace, an Italian...
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Beware the Mean Beach Attendant, and Other News
From the cover of Ferrante’s The Beach at Night.Our basketball columnist, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, has stepped over to The New Yorker to bid farewell to Kobe Bryant. And he’s a defender of Bryant’s...
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Is That All There Is?: An Interview with Stephanie Danler
The first sentence of Stephanie Danler’s riveting debut novel is perhaps more an injunction than an imperative: “You will develop a palate.” Over the 355 pages of Sweetbitter, the narrator,...
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That Was Not a Very Nice Thing to Do, and Other News
From the cover of My Brilliant Friend. It’s possible you survived the whole weekend without hearing about the unmasking of Elena Ferrante, whose “true identity” (like those exist!) was revealed...
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It’s Never Too Late to Mock Nixon, and Other News
Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard), 1971, ink on paper, 10 1/2″ x 13 7/8″. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. “I do nothing professionally, I do everything for fun,”...
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Pointillism: The Prequel, and Other News
Detail from a Seurat painting. Has this ever happened to you: you invent a whole new kind of painting, and you’re feeling really proud of yourself and super accomplished, and then you discover that...
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Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
Matteo Pericoli is the founder of the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, an interdisciplinary project that looks at fiction through the lens of architecture, designing and building stories as...
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