Short Order

Every few years, fiction readers are warned about the death of the short story. But there are loyalists to the genre—this magazine among them—and work continues to be published for those who know where to look. Storyville, an app available for iPhone and iPad, joins the push on the electronic literary front by giving its […]

Between the Lines

Earlier this month, Shaun Usher—a freelance copywriter and the man behind Letters of Note and Letterheady—launched Scaffoldage, a site devoted to the beauty of scaffolding. Photographs of construction and restoration sites as varied as the New York World’s Fair, an ancient Chinese palace, and a water tower in England feature latticeworks of scaffolding that, in […]

Time’s a Goon

I think the New Yorker Book Club discussion technically started last week with Kate’s report on the “Eat, Drink, and Be Literary” event with Jennifer Egan and the New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, at B.A.M. “I became interested in Bennie while writing about Sasha, and interested in Bennie’s ex-wife while writing about Bennie … […]

Lessons

On September 2, 2001, I arrived in Rome for a semester abroad. My pensione’s lone TV didn’t get any English stations, and my Italian wasn’t good enough for me to make sense of the newspapers. As a result, I spent most of that fall in a state of hyper self-awareness, intuiting the season’s events in […]

Q&A: Jews Behaving Badly

In the July 18, 1988, issue of The New Yorker, Adam Schwartz published “The Grammar of Love,” a short story based on his teaching experiences in Chicago. He followed with the publication of “This Bed” in the June 22, 1992, issue, and earlier this year, both stories were incorporated into the novel “A Stranger on […]

Texas Ranger

“I can’t imagine a music-related event on earth that requires more advance planning and preparation than South by Southwest in Austin, Texas,” writes NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson, outlining the wide-ranging schedule of the new-music festival—running through Saturday—which features some two thousand acts appearing on more than eighty stages. In an effort to sort out the […]

Women’s Work

After Ann Friedman, a contributing editor and columnist at The American Prospect, saw Vida’s statistics on women in publishing last month, she launched Lady Journos, “a one-stop shop for lazy editors who claim there aren’t many women journalists,” as she wrote on her personal site. Lady Journos highlights the work of lesser-known women from publications […]

Townie Kid

I grew up not far from Oberlin College. In high school, my friends and I would drive the 20 minutes south on Rt. 58 and hang out at the campus coffee bars. I didn’t drink coffee at the time and wouldn’t for years, not in college or when I started working, though I embraced every […]

Story Time

On Monday, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum—the duo behind the new-media short-story venture Electric Lit—launched the public beta site of Broadcastr, a location-based storytelling project that allows users to record, index, listen to, and share stories about the places that inspired them, online or on a mobile device. So far, Hunter says, Broadcastr has partnerships […]