Best New Yorker Life and Letters
Life and Letters explores literary culture through essays on writers, books, and the world of letters. These pieces examine how literature intersects with life and society.
18 picks · 1993–2015
Top authors: David Remnick (3), Adam Gopnik (2), Joan Acocella (1)
Why do we still search for relics of the Bard?
Selling Hollywood on an updated convent comedy.
James Wood writes that George Orwell, a Puritan radical who deplored poverty but detested privilege even more, yearned for an uncorrupted, pre-modern England.
The sadness over the author’s death, D. T. Max writes, was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete.
Daniel Zalewski talks to the novelist, whose empirical temperament distinguishes him from his friends Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
LIFE AND LETTERS in which the author describes an encounter following the loss and recovery of his hat. One day, while wintering in the Southwest, the …
Grappling with the twentieth century.
Haruki Murakami on learning how to go the distance as a writer and a runner.
Adam Gopnik on why the evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin spent so long preparing to write his masterpiece, “On the Origin of Species.”
Louis Menand on J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” and on the persistent power of Holden Caulfield, fifty years after the book’s publication.
Joan Didion on the words he wrote—and didn’t.
David Remnick on Katharine Graham, of the Washington Post, the most imposing woman in journalism.
David Remnick on Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post.
LIFE AND LETTERS on former President Ronald Reagan's handwritten announcement of his Alzheimer's disease. The author is Reagan's biographer and…
David Remnick’s 1994 Profile of the author of “Invisible Man.”
West is trying to resurrect the role of the activist philosopher without completely shaking up the academy, Jervis Anderson wrote, in 1994.
Joan Acocella on The New Yorker’s former book critic, and the gift for fiction that she nursed under the cover of her acerbic wit.