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/lit/ - Literature

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11877962 No.11877962 [Reply] [Original]

Anyone here reads the New Yorker? Would you say it's a nice piece of journalism or classify it as crap?

>> No.11877964

It's basically a parody of itself at this point.

It doesn't publish good fiction or poetry, either, despite being selective as fuck.

>> No.11878272

It still has the clout to pull in some of the biggest names around. Heck, Zadie Smith had a wonderful short story in just a few month's back. But it’s main function was to remind me how long it’s been since I was actually exited by something in the New Yorker. For the record I rent with someone who’s had a subscription about a year now and i’ve completely lost any interest in it. I still do the mandatory title page scan, looking for recognizable name’s, but they are getting extremity rare (maybe im just not With-it anymore), and even then ,they rarely bring their A game. James Wood seems to have mostly left (to write some good novels BTW) and the new regulars, clever collage educated bunch im sure , all write in this unexciting , though technically perfect, manner.

Im not sure it’s ever been a proper hard hitting review like TLS or NYRB but while those often make curse my own scattershot education and run to the library or at least Wikipedia. The New Yorker is generally verry safe. ( James Wood was the great outlier in that regard, but he’s gone now)

They also seem to know their audience. Talk of ‘white men’ , ‘POC’ and ‘privilege’ is now commonplace and you occasionally get articles, the one about UC Berkeley comes to mind, arguing that free speech, is no longer – not in these difficult times – an affordable or desirable state. And with the Kavanaugh situation now in swing, it’s full of opinion pieces calling him a Crybaby and other such names. ( Fuck, god snow's I dont like the man but this is no way for respectable journal to behave). it’s not even detached irony anymore, it’s it’s full blown malice, spat out as fast as it can be written. Arghhhhhhh …

what else … the Poetry is shit but what else is new.

>> No.11878319

The Last Psychiatrist had it right. The New Yorker is a narcissist circlejerk.

>> No.11878326

>>11878319
Like /lit?

>> No.11878327

I don't, but I noticed you get a huge archive of their articles if you buy a monthly subscription. Seems like a good deal. Anyone ITT a subscriber?

>> No.11878334

The New Yorker is out of touch sometimes, but if you opened a copy to a random page and read a paragraph that would be a better use of your time than reading even the best content ever created on this website.

>> No.11878347

>>11878272
just asked the flatmate, who does diligently reads through the whole thing, but then he’s a magazine editor so at least he’s got a good excuse, and apparently they’ve recently started doing a lighter format. Where the regulars write small blog post’y kinda stuff while the commissions are a little more interesting but rarely about literature .

So there.

>> No.11878350

>>11877962
it has more depth than most other newspapers and weeklies. if you want any futher depth or rigor, youre going to have to read academic journals or university press books on certain topics. which isnt a bad move. i prefer scholarly historical analysis in most instances

>> No.11878353

>>11877962
It's shit. If you want to absolutely read it you can get around the paywall by browsing incognito

>> No.11878355

>>11877962
Most of it is typical modern journalism garbage. Occasionally you get an interesting article, but it's definitely not common. The short fiction they publish is pretty bad most of the time; I know they're amateur submissions but both the writing and the content are extremely low-quality.

>> No.11878358

>>11878326
Do 4chan users use the website unconsciously as a building-block in the creation of their deliberately chosen self-image?
(I'll accept either answer here)

>> No.11878421

The New Yorker has joined every Conde Nast publication and every Hearst publication in abandoning the stuff it traditionally represents for center-left GloboHomo hot takes. At this point there is nothing that distinguishes it from any other "politics for wealthy yuppies" rag

>> No.11878439

>>11878421
>judging art on the politics of the artist instead of the work itself
Absolutely disgusting

>> No.11879078

The weekly crossword is free online.

>> No.11879102

>>11877962
>Anyone here reads the New Yorker? Would you say it's a nice piece of journalism or classify it as crap?
What sort of sentence is that? Did they teach you English in school?

>> No.11879112
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11879112

>>11878439
The amount of space the fiction occupies in The New Yorker keeps getting smaller and smaller, it's an afterthought to the politics. It's only going to get worse, too, as they experience hot-take driven subscriber growth. The only thing related to art here is the Cat Power review/profile.
Don't get me wrong, there's a place for this stuff, I'm just upset that it's taken over every publication I read/used to read.

>> No.11879114

>is this painfully midwit rag good
no

>> No.11879129

>>11878334
That's incorrect.

>> No.11879130
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11879130

If the New Yorker isn’t good, then what are some good literary magazines?

>> No.11879140

>>11879130
Granta and Lapham's Quarterly are the only ones I read with any frequency

>> No.11879165

i liek the interviews in the paris review

>> No.11879215

>>11879130
also interested in this

especially if there are some literary magazines that aren't yet festering with insane politics

i can confirm that all of australia's literary magazines are complete jokes

many of them are retarded progressive rags with no working business model or readership, so they try to convert potential writers into readers

the only exception is the single conservative/classical liberal rag, which reeks of an old boys club of tin eared old men trying to fight lost battles and shill for right wing politics

>> No.11879223

Read 3AM

>> No.11879256

>>11877962
The New Yorker is meme. It’s a parody of itself as someone already said.

>> No.11879400

>>11877962
Cliche liberal "intellectual" garbage. Useful for feeling smart if you're not.

>> No.11879437

>>11878358
I'm confident in saying a significant portion of the people who are still here for some reason use the website very consciously as a building-block in the creation of their deliberately chosen self-image and it's pretty pathetic

>> No.11879474

>>11878421
I wonder )))who((( could be behind this post.

>> No.11879573

>>11879437
I'm not sure it counts as narcissism if they do it consciously.

>> No.11879582

>>11879573
I think it might, but it could go either way. I think some people are probably here to prove something to themselves, either because they think they're the last of the old guard or just rebelling against whatever.

>> No.11879602

>>11879437
I want to leave, I don't even get good book suggestions from here anymore.

>> No.11879900

>>11878272
James Wood’s Upstate was good?

Only his second novel, though, right? He hasn’t written novels plural in recent years. The first novel was way back, and I think even he considered it not very good.

>> No.11879955

>>11877962
It used to be top tier with chads like E B White on staff but now it is safely middlebrow, centering on narrative nonfiction to allow its reader base to fake an intelligent conversation on topics they know nothing about, with its fiction section devoted to more or less virtue signaling bullshit. In short, it sucks.

>> No.11879973

>>11879130
The New Criterion is a really good journal, focused on classic lit, art, music and culture with a bit of sardonic political commentary along the lines of puncturing bad arguments others buy without reservation. Highly recommend.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/10

>> No.11879978

>>11879973
Sorry, to clarify, New Criterion doesn't publish any fiction (though it does publish poetry) but it's really good anyways, please check it out anons.

>> No.11880034

>>11877962
Crap. The crossword is the only good thing about it. And even then, the original (cryptic) crossword from 1998 or so was better.

>> No.11880073

>>11879900
>James Wood’s Upstate was good?

yes

>> No.11880347

>>11878272
>They also seem to know their audience.
I would use precisely what you've said to argue that they do not know it. Rather, they're creating a new audience.

I don't read the New Yorker, but I do listen to their podcasts, primarily, The Writer's Voice. Zadie Smith's story was certainly good, but the best one they've had recently (excluding Yiyun Li's, as I haven't listened to her read it), was Cecilia Awakened by Tessa Hadley. The recent male writers they've had on were disappointingly disappointing. Intentional, or is it only mediocre males which write fictions to their tastes?

>> No.11880355

that article they published about linus stepping down was utter and total bullshit, after that i didn't even bother to read the insane yale gangrape squad article, new yorker is a piece of shit for pseuds

>> No.11880711

>>11879130
Foreign Affairs is alright.

>> No.11880789

>>11880347
I didn’t care for Hadley’s story

>> No.11880840

>>11880073
Unironically, can you elaborate? I love the guy to death for How Fiction Works, and he got me reading Reservoir 13 which wad also not bad.

>> No.11880906

>>11880840

Ok …
well, it felt true.
It’s about two daughters, one is happy, one is not.

It put me in mind of Kafka’s letter to is father – a small part of it at least – where he dosent so much reproach his father but considers his own temperament as the main point of failure and laments the arbitrary nature of it all. Upstate is similar in that it’s about temperament and predisposition and how people sabotage their own lives not so much out of parental spite, but out of some deep rooted instinct they dont understand. (and the girl is philosophy teacher so she is trying to understand)

also reminds me of Philip Roth’s Aamerican Pastoral.
The Swede desperate to understand why his daughter turned terrorist and blaming it on a kiss.


And it for the most part feels true. And is, no surprise, well written.

a solid 7/10.

>> No.11880908

>>11877962
kill yourself, and if this is a bot that posts these kill yourself all the same. sick fucking site

>> No.11880950
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11880950

Will someone explain to me characteristics of New Yorker style, what are they exactly? and what do they mean when they say it's technically perfect?

I'm not burgerlander so I can't read it.

>> No.11880959

>>11878272
you seem to have trouble distinguishing between contractions and possessive determiners.

>name's
>it's

>> No.11880997

>>11880908
Are you stupid or what

>> No.11881006

>>11880950

Me neither, but you notice it. There is a house-style where you feel it’s the magazine that's writing rather then the author.
For example the have a thing for repeating prepositions in longer sentences where im almost sure the author had an “it” or something they would repeat of that the “it” was.
They also seem to have clear rules about the difference between On and Upon or That and Which or other such minor details and it can – this is a criticism as old as the New Yorker – overwhelm a piece of prose.


Im sure they have a style guide if you truly give a shit.

>>11880959

I wouldn't defend >>11878272
but what’s exactly wrong with the “name’s” ?

>> No.11881117

>>11878319
pretty much

Tom Wolfe wrote a great piece about how it was never more than "a slavish copy of Punch" written by New York intellectuals with an inferiority complex towards Europe. "They tried -so hard- to be English." etc

>> No.11881278

I'm not saying that all journalism is garbage but if you fired lethal radiation wildly into a crowd of reporters the likeliest bad thing to happen would be that one of them got superpowers and could work faster

>> No.11881899

>>11877962
>nice piece of journalism
>America
Like every other, "chic" Murrican magazine, it tries to emulate real class Europäer stuff but ends up completely failing. The only thing New York had brought into the civilisation is the Cosa Nostra, sleazy sex shows and a bunch of Woody Allen wankery.

>> No.11881903

I've just spent the evening reading the TLS and ohhhhhh wee is it infinitely better.

Good subject matter , familiar names , interesting reviews.

>> No.11882340

>>11879130
>>11879215

London Review is still pretty great.