New Yorker magazine alert thread

"literary fiction" is just another genre anyway"

a point made in the Time piece.

I was kind of disappointed in the NYer genre fiction article too. Krystal starts out like he might try to question the hoary literature:art::genre:escapism dualism, but instead he writes about some literary folk who enjoyed the odd bit of genre fiction as a guilty pleasure, and then not so subtly looks down his nose at genre fiction and reconfirms the old verities.

feel liek getting literary writers to do scifi is exactly what the nyer should do w/its scifi issue, otherwise its just scifi inside the nyer who cares - lipsyte piece is funny grafting a scifi-ish ending onto an otherwise non scientific story in order to qualify, i always check for him even tho i generally dont read the nyer fiction, i read a book of his once that was v good too, recommend - the other story that took place in post global warming hispaniola i liked - i will never read any of these reminiscences of childhood scifi tho f that noise

"This, most fundamentally, is where I disagree with Krystal. It’s hard to talk about what plot does, but that’s not the fault of genre fiction. If anything it’s because criticism has failed the genre novel. Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite. I often find that the complexity of the narratives in genre fiction makes the narratives in literary novels look almost amateur by comparison. Look at George R.R. Martin: no literary novelist now writing could orchestrate a plot the way he does. Even if you grant that the standards for writing and characterization in genre fiction are lower than in literary fiction, the standards for plotting are far, far higher."

sigh

Holding up George RR Martin for great plotting is pretty extraordinary.

Lipsyte is good at asshole dialogue. Dunno why the mag ran that brief defensive Le Guin essay except to remind people, as scott said, that old people still exist.

ha, what did le guin say? i feel like this whole argument really belongs in the 60s/70s so i am curious

she remembered how the evil men in the lit crit establishment of the fifties dismissed sci fi (rather weird placing Edmund Wilson among them; the guy always kicked against the establishment too).

he dissed h p lovecraft apparently

yeah but hp lovecraft was a terrible writer

your mom was a terrible writer

i enjoyed the spilling beer on mrs. heinlein part tho

lethem is a sci-fi writer, or a former sci-fi writer at least

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, May 29, 2012 5:54 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

RONG

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 2:13 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not RONG:

“Ninety Percent of Everything”
with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1999

“Access Fantasy”
Starlight 2, Tor Books, 1998

“Five Fucks”
Nebula Awards Anthology 1997, Harcourt Brace, 1998

“The Darcy Bee” story collaboration
Omni Online, February 1998

“The Edge of the Bed of Forever”
with Angus MacDonald
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1997

“How We Got in Town and Out Again”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1996

“The True History of the End of the World”
with James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct 1995

“The Insipid Profession of Jonathan Horneboom”
Full Spectrum 5, 1995

“Receding Horizon” with Carter Scholz
Crank! #5; Summer 1995

“Forever, Said the Duck”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1993

“The Precocious Objects”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1993

“Hugh Merrow”
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October/November 1993

“A Small Patch on My Contract”
Interzone, April 1993

“Vanilla Dunk”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1992

“The Speckless Cathedral”
Interzone, March 1992

“Ad Man”
Science Fiction Review, March 1992

“Program's Progress”
Universe 2, 1992

“The Happy Man”
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1991

“A Mirror for Heaven”
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Summer 1990

“The Cave Beneath the Falls”
Aboriginal SF, January/February 1989

spin-off but until we've got an elif batuman alert thread:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n11/elif-batuman/diary

The cover of the sci-fi issue helpfully tells the reader the era in which this "hey sci-fi has artistic merit too!" angle would have been in any way fresh or illuminating.

eliiiiiif

she is just such a perfect person

her twitter account is great also: https://twitter.com/#!/BananaKarenina, playfully belligerent sparring w/helen dewitt, &c

it really is! latest greatest of course being her taking the piss out of tao lin for noticing she unfollowed him

https://twitter.com/BananaKarenina/status/209588763251310592

lol oh man i know, 'sweetie'

documentary abt that french impostor grann wrote abt http://kottke.org/12/06/the-impostor

this is awesome: david grann discusses researching his most recent article - http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2012/06/08/david-grann-on-the-making-of-the-yankee-comandante/

how much does someone like Grann make for a big NYer story like that?

if he's a staff writer hes salaried at ~100k a/y iirc

Just finished that story. Amazing.

I take it back the SF article is awesome and btw the Ray Bradbury one ;_;

I mean issue

Also smh at hating on Ursula K Leguin

Just read the Jennifer Egan story in the sci-fi issue, very entertaining. I can't decide what I think of her, exactly, but I do think she's good at what she does.

Sexy philanthropy article is so much awesome for its schadenfreude.

Haven't seen this week's issue yet but I'm a fan of this sentence. ^^^

It's a few weeks old, that article, actually.

&*%$ New Yorker!

how much does someone like Grann make for a big NYer story like that?

I think the gist is that staff get paid low six figures and are basically given a very long leash, required to submit so many thousand words a year in some shape or form but mostly left to write and research.

Hey, want to hear something cool? Apparently I was on the cover of the New Yorker's mother's day issue, in cartoon form, with my kids!

What issue was the Grann article in

Ps cool josh

so in 2012 we need a Ben Stiller profile that takes up half the magazine?

Dude's a rising star. "Greenberg," "Night in the Museum 2," etc. Going places.

http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2012/06/18/le-guin-s-hypothesis/

I blame Tad Friend.

The current issue is really boring IMO. Generally find their US political coverage to be blah, and I also think they kind of over-cover the middle east. Right now would be a good time for some articles on Europe.

hah!

"The trouble with the Litfic vs Genre idea is that what looks like a reasonable distinction of varieties of fiction always hides a value judgment: Lit superior, Genre inferior. Sticking in a middle category of Good Bad Books is no help. You might just as well make another one, Bad Good Books, which everybody could fill at their whim — mine would contain a whole lot of Booker Prize winners..."

Sorry I mean the June 18 issue.

Seth McFarlane = no one cares
Obama article = zzz
Mid-east elections article = zzz
Evangelical Preacher guy = sort of entertaining, but very standard "OMG look how crazy and backward these people are" fare

Apparently I was on the cover of the New Yorker's mother's day issue, in cartoon form, with my kids!

Awesome. Was that an accurate depiction of the parenting scene in O.P.?

Evangelical Preacher guy = sort of entertaining, but very standard "OMG look how crazy and backward these people are" fare

I didn't read this, but I was amused to learn that the guy attacked the New Yorker piece primarily for its overuse of exclamation points in quotes attributed to him.

via alfred

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/120702crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all

thought it makes a valid point but geez I wish people would stop it w/ noble savages and all that

excited to read the menand essay

Hated that Kolbert piece. Wish someone would write a story about all the machete-wielding jungle kids who don't make it. Reason I don't let my kids clean the house is because I'd rather clean the house than clean the house and clean up the mess they make cleaning the house.

I started that Ben Stiller piece, which I thought would be an OK state-of-Hollywood profile, but then it keeps going, and going, and the movie they keep describing him trying to make sounds sooooo bad, like "Bruce Almighty 2" or something.

The big prob with that preacher is he's so influential. And as a follow-up to Romney's gay spokesman getting the message to resign, Jane Mayer recently quoted the preacher's on-air amazement, re if Romney would cave in to "some little hick like me," what would he do when dealing with evil foreigners etc?

The Mexico article this week covers much the same ground as the NY Times magazine a few weeks back, but is still a great read.

A good friend of mine shot this week's preacher photo.

The Menand essay is just ok: his usual smooth job of introducing a subject to a general audience who this time probably knows a litle about Joyce.

via alfred

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/120702crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all

thought it makes a valid point but geez I wish people would stop it w/ noble savages and all that

― Faith in Humanity: Restored (dayo), Thursday, 28 June 2012 22:54 (Yesterday) Permalink

This is everywhere in parenting right now, unfortunately. "Traditional societies" is the buzzword. Unless you're conservative, in which case it's "the french." But no matter how you slice it, americans are doing in wrong.