the New Yorker
John Updike’s letters overflow with lust, ambition, guilt and shame
‘Affairs are cruel, and if they are sin, they carry the punishment with them’, he wrote to one of the many women he cheated on throughout a long life
Remembering Hiroshima 80 years on
Iain MacGregor’s impeccably researched account of the first use of nuclear weapons in war is a timely reminder of the horrors they unleash on the world
A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed
Returning to the family house in Dublin after the death of her mother in Paris, 22-year-old Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her embittered grandmother
Reading pulp fiction taught me how to write, said S.J. Perelman
The great humourist ascribes his success to the hours he spent deep in the adventures of Tarzan and Fu Manchu – and watching lurid B movies in afternoon cinemas
Quiet brilliance
The author once takes a big issue and, with her characteristic quiet brilliance, illuminates it in a small homely setting
Jeffrey Toobin’s stroke of misfortune
Jeffrey Toobin is a man much wronged. On Monday, the New Yorker writer was suspended by the magazine for which…
Beyond a joke
The universal cartoon is a rare thing
Greece is the word for the New Yorker’s Comma Queen
Mary Norris’s book about her love affair with Greece and the Greek language starts with a terrific chapter about alphabets.…
How I’d sex down the weather forecast
I have, for utterly explicable reasons, not been asked to guest-edit Radio 4’s Today this Christmas. Had I, though, I would…
Art and aspiration
When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and…
A touch of class
The New Yorker has always been revered for the supreme quality of its writing, says Philip Hensher
Long life
I was wondering what to write about this week when I suddenly realised that exactly 40 years ago this Saturday…
Sharpen your pencil
‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career…
Dignity? Forget it!
It takes a special sort of talent to be able to make drawings of your own 97-year-old mother on her…
