Tag Archives: new yorker
Madcap Opinions in the Penny Press!
A jim-dandy issue of The New Yorker last week (starting off, as so many jim-dandy issues do, with an instant-classic happy-neurotic city-dweller cover by Edward Koren) with plenty of goo stuff inside, including a hilarious short story by Paul La Farge in which the main character has a mid-life crisis of a type immediately comprehensible [...]
Predictable Trials in the Penny Press!
It was a gruesome, entirely telegraphed one-two punch this week in the Penny Press: first, Esquire had a “How To Be a Man – The Fatherhood Edition,” and then The New Yorker had a double-sized science fiction issue. As the cognoscenti might put it, oy. Horrified – as pretty much anybody would be – by [...]
Pleasures a-Plenty in the Penny Press!
The dark days of the Penny Press appear to be over, but that might be connected to the fact that my reading today was from three of the most reliable sources of periodical enjoyment currently on the market. First up was my Bible, the mighty TLS, which featured a very peppy review by Alex De [...]
Badly Infected in the Penny Press!
My last few scrapes with the Penny Press left me thinking things might not be able to get any worse, but I was wrong: things hit rock bottom when I read this sentence in a review by Guy Dammann in the 2 March TLS: “In Don Giovanni, the general consensus was that the opera ended [...]
Superdogs in the Penny Press!
Once you hold your nose and get past Bruce McCall’s predictable, boring cover for the 27 Feb New Yorker, you have a genuine treat waiting for you inside: a great article called “Beware of the Dogs” by somebody writing under the pseudonym of “Burkhard Bilger” (in anticipation of the tsunami of innuendo I’m sure is [...]
Two Ends of the Spectrum in the Penny Press!
A New York literary friend of mine warned me about the new New Yorker – warned me that it contained an essay on Edith Wharton by one of my living literary nemeses, Jonathan Franzen. We chuckled it off, that New York literary friend and I (in fact – naturally bouncy hair, permanent fussiness, gorgeous literary [...]
Full and Proper Credit in the Penny Press!
It’s a bit unnerving, getting royally hacked off at Christopher Hitchens these days. The man’s health is fragile, after all, and it hardly feels sporting to get riled up at somebody in such a position. So I read his latest piece of Kennedy-bashing in the new Vanity Fair with my fist knotted around a napkin, [...]
Sheer Virtuosity in the Penny Press!
Granted, the Penny Press might let me down from time to time – but the main reason I love it is on full display at the newsstand this week. Clever people writing prose on deadline can be (present company of course excepted) moved to write the damndest things, and if you root through a huge [...]
Some High Notes in the Penny Press!
I’ve fallen frightfully behind – not in my Penny Press reading (as so many slackers might) but in my Penny Press reporting: issue after issue cascades by, and I read and absorb them all, but then I get caught up in making lists or fighting pointless gender battles (not to mention fighting my own phlegm [...]
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