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The New Yorker’s editors and critics considered hundreds of new releases this year in order to select the Best Books of 2023. The magazine’s writers also came across many other new favorites—classics they resolved to finally tackle, memoirs and biographies they drew on in their writing, an art book that is a beautiful object in …
Was Robert Musil right with his sardonic quip “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument”? Cenotaphs, triumphal arches, bronze effigies frozen in time and space: we walk right by, barely noticing them. They may commemorate events of profound human cost, but, as physical relics, they seldom touch us. Now and then, …
What Can Musical Monuments Achieve That Physical Ones Can’t? Read More »
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Caleb Crain reads his story “Keats at Twenty-four,” from the December 11, 2023, issue of the magazine. Crain is the author of one book of nonfiction and two novels: “Necessary Errors,” which was …
In “Keats at Twenty-four,” your story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, a nameless middle-aged writer seems to have come to something of a halt. Let’s start with the title. You quote a line from Robert Lowell: “Every writer, every journeyman, / past the halfway, is Keats at twenty-four.” How do these lines …
Most of us aren’t quite sure how we’re supposed to feel about the dramatic improvement of machine capabilities—the class of tools and techniques we’ve collectively labelled, in shorthand, artificial intelligence. Some people can barely contain their excitement. Others are, to put it mildly, alarmed. What proponents of either extreme have in common is the conviction …
After a run of sensitive British men, Taylor Swift appears to be dating a stubbled American in a No. 87 jersey, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The coupling has put America into something akin to a state of emergency, but on NBC’s “Today” show, Kelce’s mother, Donna, offered a display of calm. …
Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Dawn of the Celebrity Power Couple Read More »
Sometimes, my friends would joke that the book would almost certainly face the wrath of the right wing, as if it were something to look forward to. They figured a polarized response would be good for publicity and sales. But that prediction upset me, and we worked hard to prevent it from happening. When the …
When Your Own Book Gets Caught Up in the Censorship Wars Read More »
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Teju Cole reads his story “Incoming,” which appears in the December 4, 2023, issue of the magazine. Cole, a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, is a novelist, critic, …
In 1966, the critic Irving Howe published an essay whose title, “The Other Singer,” testified to a literary usurpation. For American readers in the nineteen-sixties, the name Singer meant Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer to have reached the pinnacle of the American literary world. Singer’s stories about Jewish life in Poland, where he …
“Incoming” is a collection of short pieces, written separately, which we assembled with the idea that they were thematically linked and would resonate together. Can you tell me what prompted you to write them, and over what period of time? For many years now, I’ve been trying to understand what constitutes a “story” (as distinct …
