Recent Articles
January 13, 2009
Staff Picks: Simenon, Johnson, Suskind, McPhee, Herzog 0
by Editor
The “staff picks” shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own “Staff Picks” in a feature appearing irregularly. Red Lights by Georges Simenon recommended [...]
January 12, 2009
Middlemarch: The Fraught Lives of Women and Men 6
by Kevin Hartnett
It sells Middlemarch short to call it a novel of manners, although if viewed from just one angle it is. The novel describes the precisely ordered life of the eponymous village in feudal England, where every resident can be placed on a grid according to his annual income and the quality of his lineage. There [...]
January 12, 2009
Missed Connections: A Review of Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency 4
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Halfway through Howards End, E.M. Forster describes a certain elm tree as a living symbol of that elusive quality called Englishness. “It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god,” Forster writes: In none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but [...]
January 10, 2009
Curiosities: 8x Buffalo 2
by Editor
Appearing Elsewhere: VQR Young Reviewers Contest winner and Millions contributor Emily drops by the NBCC blog to tell them what she’s been reading. The NY Times fleshes out some of the details of Google’s digitizing agreement with publishers and authors, including getting into some of the numbers involved. We explained the importance of the deal [...]
January 9, 2009
Salman Rushdie Runs Down 2008′s Best American Short Stories 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
Yesterday, on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, Salman Rushdie discussed the choices he made as guest-editor of Best American Short Stories 2008. A comparison with our recent post on the year’s New Yorker fiction reveals that several of his picks date to 2007. Still, Rushdie’s taste is excellent, and it’s always fun to hear him talk [...]
January 8, 2009
New Yorker Fiction by the Numbers: The Many Stories by the Few 4
by C. Max Magee
Earlier this week we took a qualitative look at recent fiction in the New Yorker, and now, with help from a Millions reader, we’re going to take a quantitative look. Last year, Frank Kovarik, who writes and teaches English in St. Louis, sent us a spreadsheet that he has used to catalog New Yorker fiction [...]