New York Nostalgia Trip
Well, Valentine’s Day is in the air, and it’s probably too late to plan a tingly night on the town. Luckily, there’s an easy way to experience years of Manhattan nightlife—you know, back when it was gritty and glamorous—and all that nostalgia won’t cost you a thing. Composed of 28 stunning Read More
When I went into my Muriel Spark phase a few months back, I soon learned that she had had a relationship with The New Yorker. But none of the books that promote the New Yorker mythology even mentions her. You will read all about Mr. Shawn and Capote and Updike and Thurber and many lesser Read More
Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 293 pages, $25.
With Tom Wolfe it mostly goes like this: The better he is, the more powerful his pyrotechnic prose, the more you hate him–the more you hate his hard-nosed politics, his fancy personal style, his magnificently self-assured talent. Ever notice how nobody cares anymore Read More
There may not be much new material in Tom Wolfe’s latest collection, Hooking Up , perhaps accounting for why the only type on the book cover is the author’s name (bright red over a canary-yellow background, with a string of interlocking rings running vertically across). The title piece, an essay on life at the millennium, Read More
When I read Renata Adler’s Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker , “Uh, oh,” I said to myself, said I. Like me, Renata–who’s a friend of whom I don’t see enough, although now that I’m leaving the Château d’If of Sag Harbor, that may change–doesn’t believe that felonious assaults on civil and artistic Read More
Gone: The Last Days of ‘The New Yorker’ , by Renata Adler. Simon & Schuster, 252 pages, $25.
Come sit for a moment, prop your chin on your hand and gaze–like Gibbon regarding the grandeur that was Rome–upon the ivy-covered ruins of the noble New Yorker . Here and there among the shapeless hummocks Read More
A few months ago, I reviewed in these pages a book of memoirs by Michael Korda, in which I turn up as a good guy. Now, Renata Adler has written a book- Gone: The Last Days of ‘The New Yorker’ -in which I’m one of the bad guys. Renata’s editor is Michael Korda, and her Read More
The World Through a Monocle: ‘The New Yorker’ at Midcentury , by Mary F. Corey. Harvard University Press, 251 pages, $25.95.
Anyone involved in creating or canonizing The New Yorker of the 40′s and 50′s will hate Mary Corey’s The World Through a Monocle: ‘The New Yorker’ at Midcentury . That’s my guess. But I Read More
As Liz Smith wrote the other day, you can get in a fistfight for saying that Lillian Ross had a right to publish Here but Not Here: A Love Story , her memoir of her long adulterous romance with the late William Shawn. Leading critics have called her tasteless and cruel just for telling her Read More
Love stories are never simple. Even for the most conventional couples, there are at least three versions of the story: his, hers and theirs. In the case of William Shawn, the late editor of The New Yorker who was married for 64 years to the former Cecille Lyon, there turns out to have been not Read More
