Books
When Gentrification Is Good
By Adam Gopnik
For a city to thrive, it has to change. But how?
Books & Fiction
Literary news, stories, poems, and reviews.
Page-Turner
The Woman Behind Latin America's Literary Boom
By Jonathan Blitzer
Literary historians maintain that it was Carmen Balcells who brought Gabriel García Márquez the contracts that got him a global readership.
A Critic at Large
PATRICK MODIANO, TRUE DETECTIVE
By Alexandra Schwartz
The Nobel Laureate set out to solve the mysteries of the French Occupation. Instead, he created his own.
Spotlight
Page-Turner
C. K. Williams in The New Yorker
By David Haglund
The late poet published several poems that touched on the subject of getting older.
A Critic at Large
WHITEY BULGER, INSIDE MAN
By Patrick Radden Keefe
The mobster secretly worked for the F.B.I. Or was it the other way around?
Reflections
A MODEST PROPOSAL
By David Sedaris
Now gay people are as good as any other dopes who want to get married.
The Writing Life
The Art of Omission
By John McPhee
Writing is selection. So how do you decide what to leave out?
Poetry
Poems
“Coming Into New York”
By John Updike
“But we look up amazed and wonder that / the green is gone out of our window.”
Poems
“Having Both the Present and Future in Mind”
By Mary Jo Bang
“I’m saying that in some cases / the inside persists until long after it doesn’t.”
Poems
“The Poem of Self”
By Stanley Moss
“Looking back, God is a verb, adjective, / article, contraction, infinitive, any part of speech.”
Teen-Age Riot
Fiction
“The Gangsters”
By Colson Whitehead
“According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses.”
Personal History
“Getting an Education”
By Mary McCarthy
“A superior education, such as, on the whole, we got in those private schools, can only be used by those it was not intended for.”
A Reporter at Large
Fly Trans-Love Airways
By Renata Adler
In nineteen-sixties Los Angeles, it was longhairs and waifs versus the world.
A Reporter at Large
The Cherubs Are Rumbling
By Walter Bernstein
In 1957, Walter Bernstein spent time with the Cherubs, a teen-age street gang. The Cherubs were not good boys.
Podcasts
Rosanna Warren Reads Ellen Bryant Voigt
Rosanna Warren joins Paul Muldoon to read and discuss Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Bear,” and her own poem “Man in Stream.”