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Did a Chatbot Write a Prize-Winning Story? Does It Matter?
In early May, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners for its influential Short Story Prize, which recognizes…
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literature
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How Reading with My Dying Mother Revealed Her Life
I was eight, and through my bedroom wall I could hear my mother, Heidi, talking to herself as she prepared to go to sleep. Every night, in…
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Jonathan Swift Wrote His Own Epitaph. Was It a Joke?
There was one text that Kenny thought was particularly relevant to his search for the truth about the epitaph. In 1732, Swift completed a…
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The Patron Saint of Oddballs and Delinquents
The New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann conjures scenes of booze-soaked calamity, where everyone and everything is on the verge of rot. Source…
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Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Is Extravagantly Superficial
Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution…
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Thelma Golden on the Literature of Harlem
When the Studio Museum in Harlem opened, in 1986, it occupied a rented loft. Last month, it reopened, after a seven-year hiatus—this time,…
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Tom Stoppard’s Radical Invitation
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” his 1966 Shakespearian meta-theatrical puzzle, about tertiary characters grappling with their…
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The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon
In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary…
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László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality
In 2011, I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkai “is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square,…
Culture
The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now
But are men actually losing? Look past the smears of Dubai chocolate, and you’ll notice that men have spent the past 11 months notching…
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The 2025 National Book Awards Longlist
This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2025 National Book Awards, including Young People’s Literature, Translated…
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Teaching Men Who Will Never Leave Prison
It’s 2018. I am, for the first time, in a classroom at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in Comstock, New York, a men’s maximum-security…
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Lost and Found: A Newly Discovered Poem by Robert Frost
“Nothing New” was written in 1918, not long before “Dust of Snow,” which was first published in an English magazine, in 1920, under a…
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Ali Smith’s Playful Dystopia
Recently, just before lunch with the Scottish author Ali Smith, at Moro, a beloved North African and Mediterranean place in London’s…
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“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” Isn’t a Feel-Good New York Story
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was an immediate best-seller when it was published, in 1943, and proved particularly popular with servicemen.…
Culture
At 56, she just published her first book—it might become a Hallmark movie
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" When faced with this question, some children know exactly what they're going to say. They…