Category Archives: Book Bench

My in-laws’ house is more than 115 years old, and when clearing out a newly discovered room in their basement—I think they knocked down a wall for some reason involving the heating system—they came across a stack of newspapers from 1912. In one edition, there was a full-page cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt as Icarus, his […]

This week’s Brieflier Noted included “The Golden Mean,” by Annabel Lyon, which sort of sounds like my wet dream in heaven as overseen by Santa Claus: This vivid imagining of the encounter between Aristotle and the young Alexander the Great casts the philosopher as a manic-depressive, veering “from black melancholy to golden joy.” Right?! Tweet

Think of that feeling you have when you’re on a truly great vacation: your stress levels drop, trivial concerns reveal themselves to be just that, and you feel—you know—that life’s purpose is deeper and simpler than what you’d believed before (side note: this happens to me every time I go to New Orleans). Now think […]

This week’s Brieflier Noted included “By Nightfall,” by Michael Cunningham; “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” by Douglas Starr; “Foreign Bodies,” by Cynthia Ozick; and “How to Live,” by Sarah Bakewell. The selection from the “By Nightfall” review intrigued me: “Cunningham’s latest novel seems almost like a dare: can Auguste Rodin, Daisy Buchanan, Damien Hirst, Gustav […]

What do yesterday’s election results mean for women? This is the question I asked Rebecca Traister, a senior writer at Salon, whose book on the 2008 election, “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” is reviewed this week in The New Yorker. In her book, Traister focuses on the anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment that polarized the Democratic party, as […]

Kicked off a new section on the Book Bench today: Brieflier Noted, which features a sentence–maybe even two! Crazy!–from each Briefly Noted book review in the magazine. I plan to do this every Tuesday. This week’s issue includes reviews on “The Convent,” by Panos Karnezi; “C,” by Tom McCarthy; “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” by Rebecca […]

In a recent Test Kitchen post, I admitted to a) being lazy and b) sexually enticing my husband via meatball. (I bring a level of professionalism to the New Yorker offices not seen in some time.) For all it revealed, though, my writing didn’t include the actual recipe for Frankies meatballs, so I’m sharing it […]