Alice Munro has to be the best short story writer on the planet! (Well, William Trevor is also amazing and so, in a totally different way, is George Saunders). Still, I’ve been reading Munro’s stories in The New Yorker for years and have also read some of her collected works, and she never ceases to startle, even shock, as [...]
Archive for the ‘The New Yorker’ Category
Munro does it again
Posted in The New Yorker on February 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
More on the Iliad
Posted in Teaching Company, The New Yorker, books on November 21, 2007 | 3 Comments »
I am really struggling to understand The Iliad, or piece together the bits I have gleaned into something comprehensive. What I got out of it was that Homer was trying to point the way to wisdom, to help mortals understand a tiny bit of the ways of the gods—or at least to realize how subjective [...]
Teaching Company Lectures
Posted in Literary Links, Teaching Company, The New Yorker, books, movies on October 31, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I’ve embarked on a new learning adventure – listening to courses on CD. The first one I am trying is called “Books that have Made History; Books that Can Change your Life,” taught by Professor J. Rufus Fears. So far, I really like it. The first lecture was about a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was [...]
The Anniversary Issue
Posted in Popular culture, The New Yorker on March 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
February 19 & 26, 2007
The article on the TV show “24″ about how popular the show is with the military was enlightening. I’ve never watched it, but it seems to feature a lot of torture, and not just by the ‘bad guys.’ What I found most interesting is that a delegation of Army officers and [...]
The Style Issue
Posted in The New Yorker on March 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
March 19, 2007
How I hate the Style Issue of The New Yorker! It used to just be a fall event, but now it is showing up in the spring as well. What a bore! As I’ve said before, I dislike the trend toward specialty issues, whether it be fashion, fiction or whatever. I read the [...]
New Yorker notes – May/June 2006
Posted in The New Yorker on July 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
I finally finished the 6/12 Summer Fiction issue, featuring soldier stories. I liked Roger Angell’s tale of protesting the Vietnam War with his daughter, but I loved Italo Calvino’s fictional “Waiting for Death in a Hotel.” It was a simple enough story, but it captured something elemental about death. When one of the protagonists realizes [...]
Jhumpa Lahiri
Posted in The New Yorker on May 15, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
I just read the Jhumpa Lahiri story (“Once in a Lifetime”) in the May 8th New Yorker. It was a bit like her novel, “The Namesake” in that it portrayed an Indian family transplanted to Cambridge, Massachusetts and the society of fellow-expatriots that they join. As in the novel, the family moves out to a [...]
February New Yorkers
Posted in The New Yorker on February 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
2/6 (Greenhouse flowers on cover) – Malcolm Gladwell’s article on profiling, racial or otherwise, was really interesting. It makes you think bulldogs have gotten a bad rap; it’s often the aggressive owners who create the aggressive dogs. As usual, Gladwell expands his topic to relate to contemporary events and draws some excellent inferences from his [...]
January New Yorkers, con’t
Posted in The New Yorker on January 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
The 1/16 issue was pretty dull. The best thing was the “Your three wishes FAQ” in Shouts & Murmurs.
The missing issue (12/26 and 1/2/06) is in my possession, thanks to P&M; so far I’ve read and enjoyed “The Albanian Writer’s Union as Mirrored by a Woman” by Ismail Kadare, an (you guessed it!) Albanian writer. [...]
January New Yorkers
Posted in The New Yorker on January 22, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
January Issues:
12/26-1/2 – missing in action.
1/9/06 – read it but I don’t really remember it.
1/16/06 – in progress
1/23-1/30/06 – Nothing remarkable in this issue. The review of the 3rd volume of the MLK biography (“At Canaan’s Edge” by Taylor Branch) had some interesting tidbits about the relationship between MLK and LBJ, and also what MLK [...]
