Writers
Story Stream
Remembering Julian Mazor November 27, 2024
When I was 14 and was suspended from school, my father gave me a book that changed my life. Washington and Baltimore is a collection of short stories by Julian Mazor (1929-2018). Mazor wrote several short stories that appeared in The New Yorker in th...
The Napkin Project (Thanksgiving Edition) November 27, 2024
In 2007, Esquire mailed 250 cocktail napkins to writers across the country with this request: Fill the blank space with fiction. We received nearly 100 napkin stories and published them all as part of the Napkin Project....
American Literature in the Trump Years November 25, 2024
Washington Post critic Michael Dirda is depressed. After the election, he couldn’t understand “how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise.”To cope, Dirda recommends literature: ...
The Role of the Modern Writer November 21, 2024
In his work for The Yale Review, Thomas Mann grappled with an artist's relationship to society. ...
25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years November 21, 2024
When we initially reached out to scores of chefs, recipe writers, historians, and food luminaries for nominations for their most important American recipes of the past 100 years—Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformat...
Bubbling Up November 20, 2024
In Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (out today via Stripe Press) tech and finance writer Byrne Hobart takes his biggest risk yet. Hobart is currently best known for his newsletter, The Diff, in which he explores business strategies and technol...
Louder in Japan November 20, 2024
In the years before publishing his first novel, 1979’s Hear the Wind Sing, Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar. The Japanese writer met his wife, Yoko, in the early 1970s, and as students at Waseda University in Tokyo, the pair opened Peter Cat, a small e...
The Logistics of Terror November 19, 2024
Every Monday between September 2021 and June 2022, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère would file 1,500 words for the Paris-based magazine L’Obs (now Le Nouvel Obs). He was part of the magazine’s three-member team covering the trial of 20 men accused ...
Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg and Her ‘Studio Mindset’ November 19, 2024
One of the most talked-about writers in business and culture journalism last year wasn’t employed by The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg.She’s the writer of a daily newsletter that launched during Covid as a short-fiction blog ...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
Alive and Kicking November 18, 2024
Toward the end of her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” on the schism in contemporary literature between realism and conceptual fiction, Zadie Smith lists a few authors to be found in the middle. “At their crossroads,” she writes, “we find extrao...
Whack-a-Mole November 18, 2024
With his third novel, David McCloskey has established himself as one of the leading spy novelists now in the game. After seven years with the CIA, followed by a stint as a consultant at McKinsey, McCloskey has become a full-time writer. His first nov...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
Only in The New Yorker November 13, 2024
A book bearing the name Dorothy Parker ought to sell, so McNally Editions have been able to offer something interesting this month: a collection of book reviews! No essays or musings, no memoir, nothing that could or should be redone as a short story...
The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression November 13, 2024
Sanora Babb spent her life dealing with all the multifarious daily perils that prevent writers from writing. She was raised in poverty by a mother who was only 16 when she gave birth to her and an abusive father who spent his days playing semi-pro ba...
Beckett Rosset's Reading List November 13, 2024
Beckett Rosset is best known as the founder and host of BECKETT'S, where he hosted underground literary salons from 2022 to 2023 out of a now-sold eccentric 1920’s townhouse in the West Village — championing some of our favorite writers, including Ni...
Fitful Glimpses and Spurts November 13, 2024
IN APRIL, an editor at Scribner, publisher of Lili Anolik’s new book Didion & Babitz, tweeted a photo of a box of galleys with the caption, “Literary It Girls™ get ready.” Responses ranged from excitement (“Inject this straight into my veins!!!”) to ...
Why Gossip Is Fatal to Good Writing November 12, 2024
Writers are great gossips. Get one or three of us alone at a party; add a few gin or whiskey drinks. Ask a question about somebody’s professor from grad school, or about that (married) handsome writer who slept with that other (married) writer at a c...
"Didion and Babitz" by Lili Anolik November 11, 2024
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work "that reads like a propulsive novel" (Oprah Daily) on the mutual attractions—and mutual antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.Co...
Joan Didion & Eve Babitz: Contemporaries, Peers, Rivals November 11, 2024
The writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were both ambitious California natives, moved in similar circles in Hollywood in the 1960s and ’70s and died within days of each other, in December 2021. In “Didion & Babitz,” the journalist Lili Anolik casts th...
Writer's Diary November 07, 2024
A terrible era is over. I don’t think I realized how much it weighed on me—on everyone. I don’t think anyone’s really willing to admit how boring life had become. How normative, and how unromantic. I guess you could call it the oppression of a false ...
On Montserrat Roig’s “The Time of Cherries” November 06, 2024
The Catalan writer Montserrat Roig came of age amid the normalized disorder and oppression of Francoist Spain. Born in 1946, she was part of a generation that bore the scars of a painful, brutal Civil War: a conflict of blurred lines, in which both p...
Heeere’s … Johnny the Iceberg! November 05, 2024
Bill Zehme, the premier magazine-profile writer of the 1990s, once told me that it was like he had two fathers. “Johnny,” he explained, “was the cool dad with the television show.”At a time when U.S. presidential candidates are fielding questions fro...
The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk November 04, 2024
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant r...
The Untethering November 04, 2024
One question I’ve wrestled with, as a writer, is how another Trump presidency would subsume the arts. As I’ve offered already, I do not know who will win the presidential election and speculation like this shouldn’t be taken as an assertion that Dona...
