From the Newsstand
January 4, 2011
New Yorker Fiction By the Numbers 8
by Frank Kovarik
Several years ago I started cataloging the fiction published in The New Yorker in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet began merely as a way to keep track of what I’d read, but I soon became curious about what the spreadsheet’s data-sorting capabilities could reveal.
October 21, 2010
No Satisfaction: Keith Richards and the Rock Memoir 9
by Jim Santel
Rock-and-roll memoirs are among the most persistently disappointing literary subgenre. Genius that relies on fleeting inspiration, gut feeling, and unthinking improvisation is ill suited to the slow, reflective process of writing. It takes an outsider to get inside.
September 29, 2010
Under the Influence 0
by Ujala Sehgal
But did we quote from The End of the Affair because of our romantic failures, or were we failing romantically because we could quote from The End of the Affair?
August 16, 2010
The Franzen Cover and a Brief History of Time 17
by Craig Fehrman
A look at Time‘s 83 literary coverboys and -girls reveals a waffling between reaching out and selling out that, today, we’d describe as Franzean.
June 7, 2010
The Risks of Fiction: On The New Yorker Writers Under 40 List 6
by Frank Kovarik
The rewards of fiction can be greater than that of nonfiction—the ecstatic feeling of transport when you’re pulled into the world of a story, given a new window into human experience—but you can also come away from a story angry that the writer has just wasted 45 minutes of your life.
May 3, 2010
Will the iPad Change Publishing? Ask The Atlantic 11
by Lizzie Skurnick
The cover of Fiction 2010 offers, to say the least, a provocative vision. The future is plentiful and bright—and there is not an iPad in sight.