Sometimes it seems like everyone’s selling something. They’re selling their jewelry. They’re selling their book, selling their snack line, their natural cosmetics, their Etsy shop and blog and, ultimately, themselves. In The New Yorker‘s 2015 Style Issue, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about Bethenny Frankel, who turned her slot on The Real Housewives of New York City into […]
Quotes
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
A Case of Mistaken Identity: Percival Everett’s New Collection of Stories
After a night in a motel I returned to the library the next morning and looked at images of Graham Greene. The man in my photograph did look a lot like Graham Greene, but also different. Regardless, I didn’t know where next to look. I decided to try the sheriff’s office. The inside of the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Betting Against the Relationship Bubble
Joe Berkowitz has been writing a series for the Awl about modern relationships, and his final installment was published this week.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Firsts,’ ‘Lasts,’ and ‘Onlys’ at the International Music Feed
Over at Noisey, Lisa Mrock has written a wonderfully personal requiem for a short-lived TV channel called the International Music Feed. The music video-based television network in question only existed for three years (from 2005 to 2008), but it made quite an impact during its brief tenure: In an age where hardly anything is original, the International Music […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
When Your Grandparents Are Intellectuals: A Family’s History Through Books
All of that mid-century Marxist devotional intensity was concentrated in Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom. There were Socialist and Communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English, Hebrew. There were old pamphlets so yellowed by time that one risked their disintegration simply by touching them. When Chimen and his close friend Henry Collins, who had collaborated […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Savoring the Quintessential New York Hot Dog Experience
A much better example came on Central Park West in the lower Sixties, where a second Mohammad operated a stand. He told me that he’s from Alexandria and has been in New York for four years. (“Some people are good. Others, not so much,” he said of his customers.) Every winter, when the hot-dog business […]
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Alexander Chee on Writing, Success, and Subletting Below Chloë Sevigny
At Catapult, Alexander Chee has a self-reflective essay about a period in the early aughts when he got to sublet a friend’s plum 19th-story apartment in Gramercy Park. She let him have it for just $900 per month, a steal, which took a great deal of financial pressure off of him. This was after the […]
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C.J. Chivers’ Particular Brand of War Journalism
The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
My Work, My Choice: ‘I Am a Prostitute’
As she prepares to transition out of sex work and into writing full-time, Charlotte Shane reflects on the politics of identity—specifically, her decision to call herself a prostitute.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
Angela Carter on Myth and Deception in Hollywood
Angela Carter’s short story “The Merchant of Shadows” first appeared in The London Review of Books in 1989. Set in Hollywood, the narrator is a young, male student conducting research on a famed but mysterious director. The story bends and twists, ricocheting between dark comedy, deep camp, and Carter’s signature surreal, Gothic sensibility. Carter was an ardent fan […]