Curated playlist
The New Yorker people
- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald sold fewer than 23,000 copies of The Great Gatsby in its first year, and the novel posted tepid sales for the rest of his life. He died in 1940 believing his life was a failure and his work forgotten. The few critics…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with them the memory of a life that had already collapsed. His mother could not stop…
- Jonathan FranzenJonathan Franzen was born on the 17th of August, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and by the time he was in his early forties, he had managed to get his glasses stolen off his face at a London book launch party. That happened in 2010,…
- Edmund WilsonEdmund Wilson Jr. sent a postcard. Not to a friend, not to an editor, but to strangers who wrote asking for his time. The card listed, in exhaustive detail, every request he would not honor: reading manuscripts, delivering lectures,…
- William DalrympleWilliam Dalrymple first arrived in Delhi on the 26th of January 1984, a teenager who had grown up on the shores of the Firth of Forth in North Berwick, Scotland. He was eighteen years old. What drew him there, and what kept him returning…
- Yukio MishimaOn the 25th of November 1970, Yukio Mishima stepped onto a balcony at a military base in central Tokyo and shouted to the soldiers below, "Where has the spirit of the samurai gone?" The men jeered. Helicopters drowned out his words.…
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities were advertising academic positions specifically requesting experts in the field,…
- Yves BonnefoyYves Bonnefoy was born on the 24th of June 1923 in Tours, and by the time he died in Paris on the 1st of July 2016, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had called him perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century.…
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford was born on the 19th of October 1895 in Flushing, Queens, and spent the next nine decades becoming one of the most wide-ranging thinkers America ever produced. He never finished a college degree. Tuberculosis interrupted his…
- Vladimir SorokinVladimir Sorokin was born on the 7th of August 1955 in Bykovo, a district of Moscow Oblast, and he went on to become one of the most provocative literary voices in contemporary Russian writing. He trained not as a writer but as an…