March 5, 2012
"A missing person story makes for a difficult narrative; it’s a tale without a third act, a Chekhovian gun that never fires. None of the subjects in the stories below—among them a cruise ship employee, a civil rights figure, and a hero of the Holocaust—have been found."

— Missing Persons: Longform’s guide to the most chilling stories ever about people who disappeared. - Slate Magazine

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January 5, 2012
"Mr. Langewiesche suggests in the book that most trained commercial airline pilots could have handled the landing and that Captain Sullenberger came to be viewed as a hero largely because the country badly needed a hero. “His performance was a work of extraordinary concentration, which the public misread as coolness under fire,” Mr. Langewiesche writes."

— Sullenberger’s Passengers Say He’s a Hero, Despite New Book - NYTimes.com

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December 4, 2011
It is something of a surprise that one of the best magazine profiles of the last decade is about Axl Rose. But such is the work of John Jeremiah Sullivan, who can take pretty much anything you never thought you’d want to read about respectably (Axl Rose, “Real World”) or anything you never thought you’d want to read about at all (a Christian-rock festival, long-forgotten naturalist loons), and make of it the sort of essay-world you just want to dwell inside. Sullivan seems able to do almost anything, to work in any register, and not just within a single piece but often in the span of a single paragraph. (via Pulphead - By John Jeremiah Sullivan - Book Review - NYTimes.com) PULPHEAD By John Jeremiah Sullivan 369 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.

It is something of a surprise that one of the best magazine profiles of the last decade is about Axl Rose. But such is the work of John Jeremiah Sullivan, who can take pretty much anything you never thought you’d want to read about respectably (Axl Rose, “Real World”) or anything you never thought you’d want to read about at all (a Christian-rock festival, long-forgotten naturalist loons), and make of it the sort of essay-world you just want to dwell inside. Sullivan seems able to do almost anything, to work in any register, and not just within a single piece but often in the span of a single paragraph. (via Pulphead - By John Jeremiah Sullivan - Book Review - NYTimes.com)

PULPHEAD

By John Jeremiah Sullivan

369 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.

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November 16, 2011
Blue Nights is a story of loss: simple, wrenching, inconsolable loss. The absence of Quintana becomes the most present thing in Didion’s life. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously wrote in The White Album. Blue Nights is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale. The book has, instead, an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer that is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No. (via ‘Elegy to the Void’ by Cathleen Schine | The New York Review of Books)

Blue Nights is a story of loss: simple, wrenching, inconsolable loss. The absence of Quintana becomes the most present thing in Didion’s life. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously wrote in The White Album. Blue Nights is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale. The book has, instead, an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer that is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No. (via ‘Elegy to the Void’ by Cathleen Schine | The New York Review of Books)

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November 7, 2011
Throughout her career, in her novels and especially in her journalism, Didion has been a connoisseur of catastrophe. Early on she forged — ambiguous word — a style for dealing with the world’s dreads and disasters, a style that has been much admired and much imitated. Her tone, measured yet distraught, is that of a witness who has journeyed, consciously if not willingly, to the heart of private and, more momentously, public horror in order to bring us back the bad news. Although she is always balanced, she is not a disinterested reporter; she writes with a numbed eloquence, and at its best her writing catches with awful immediacy the acrid flavor of an age that has known the Nazis’ death camps, Hiroshima, cold war terror, as well as the smaller nastinesses, the riots, the assassinations, the massacres — the mayhem that informs the noisy background of all our lives in a time that seems to have lost its collective mind. (via Blue Nights - By Joan Didion - Book Review - NYTimes.com)

Throughout her career, in her novels and especially in her journalism, Didion has been a connoisseur of catastrophe. Early on she forged — ambiguous word — a style for dealing with the world’s dreads and disasters, a style that has been much admired and much imitated. Her tone, measured yet distraught, is that of a witness who has journeyed, consciously if not willingly, to the heart of private and, more momentously, public horror in order to bring us back the bad news. Although she is always balanced, she is not a disinterested reporter; she writes with a numbed eloquence, and at its best her writing catches with awful immediacy the acrid flavor of an age that has known the Nazis’ death camps, Hiroshima, cold war terror, as well as the smaller nastinesses, the riots, the assassinations, the massacres — the mayhem that informs the noisy background of all our lives in a time that seems to have lost its collective mind. (via Blue Nights - By Joan Didion - Book Review - NYTimes.com)

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October 23, 2011
Blue Nights is a disturbing book, though not for the obvious reasons. While Magical Thinking “just flew out”, she says, this one was torture to write and it shows. The style seems empty, mannered. The elegiac tone, which has, on occasion, made critics roll their eyes, tips here into contrivance. And yet. (As she would put it.) Blue Nights is a horrifying documentary of a writer observing herself in the moment of dissolution, when she can’t remember how to write, can’t wholly remember who she is. “What if I can never again locate the words that work?” she writes and Blue Nights, while a failure in conventional terms compared with Magical Thinking, is in some ways a more accurate depiction of a woman unravelling. (via Joan Didion: life after death | Books | The Guardian)

Blue Nights is a disturbing book, though not for the obvious reasons. While Magical Thinking “just flew out”, she says, this one was torture to write and it shows. The style seems empty, mannered. The elegiac tone, which has, on occasion, made critics roll their eyes, tips here into contrivance. And yet. (As she would put it.) Blue Nights is a horrifying documentary of a writer observing herself in the moment of dissolution, when she can’t remember how to write, can’t wholly remember who she is. “What if I can never again locate the words that work?” she writes and Blue Nights, while a failure in conventional terms compared with Magical Thinking, is in some ways a more accurate depiction of a woman unravelling. (via Joan Didion: life after death | Books | The Guardian)

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(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: Joan Didion 
September 4, 2011
"It seems there have always been — and continue to be — little armies of Eden chasers who take this quest very seriously, carrying their search to the most unlikely places. Wilensky-Lanford carries the reader along on some of these journeys, from the North Pole to rural Ohio, evoking the lives and characters of a collection of eccentrics that includes a professional archaeologist and a preacher, as well as a Chinese businessman and a British irrigation engineer. What these disparate types have in common is their insistence that they have finally and truly cracked the biblical code."

— Paradise Lust - By Brook Wilensky-Lanford - Book Review - NYTimes.com

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August 23, 2011

This week in the magazine, Susan Orlean writes about Rin Tin Tin, the legendary German shepherd who was designated the most popular performer in the United States in 1927. Here Orlean discusses Rin Tin Tin’s acting and athleticism in “Clash of the Wolves” (1925), “the most memorable” of the six Rin Tin Tin films still available. (via News Desk: Video: The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin : The New Yorker)

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August 18, 2011
"This is the kind of thing where in another life—one where I didn’t have kids and a household—I would be Truman Capote. I would love to go down and stay in Huntsville for a month and talk to her every day in the jail and really try to learn who this person was and write a really gripping story. I really think this is an “In Cold Blood” type of book begging to be written by someone, because of her weird history. Part of that, too, is that you really have to live with this character in your head— and I’m not sure I want to spend that much of my mental time in the company of Amy Bishop."

— Meredith Wadman probes the aftermath of a shooting |

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August 13, 2011
"But it’s not a matter of listing who Schmidle didn’t talk to; it’s a matter of describing in greater detail the people he did speak with. Readers want more information about who reporters interviewed so they can judge for themselves how credible a reporter’s sources are."

— Schmidle defends sourcing in New Yorker’s ‘Getting bin Laden’ story, while narrative editors suggest improvements | Poynter.

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