AvatarThe New YorkerAvatarAvatarSome Notes on Attunementverified_publisherThe New Yorker - Zadie SmithA voyage around Joni Mitchell. The first time I heard her I didn’t hear her at all. My parents did not prepare me. (The natural thing in these situations is to blame the parents.) She was nowhere to be found on their four-foot-tall wood-veneer hi-fi. Given the variety of voices you got to hear on …
AvatarThe New YorkerAvatarAvatarTrading Storiesverified_publisherThe New Yorker - Jhumpa LahiriBooks, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, or perhaps because my parents considered buying books for me an …
AvatarThe New YorkerAvatarAvatarThe Pamuk Apartmentsverified_publisherThe New Yorker - Orhan PamukMy mother, my father, my older brother, my father’s mother, my uncles, and my aunts—we all lived on different floors of the same five-story apartment house. Until the year before I was born, the different branches of the family had (like so many large Ottoman families) lived together in a large …
AvatarThe New YorkerAvatarAvatarThe Challengeverified_publisherThe New Yorker - Gabriel García MárquezA young writer proves himself. I never imagined that, nine months after I had completed secondary school, my first story would be published in Fin de Semana, the weekend literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, and the most interesting and demanding literary publication of the time. Forty-two …
AvatarThe New YorkerAvatarAvatarTrouble in the Tribeverified_publisherThe New Yorker - Daphne MerkinI’ve been trying to lose my religion for years now, but it refuses to go away. Just when I think I’ve shaken it—put it firmly behind me, a piece of my obscurantist past no longer suited to the faithless life I now lead—it turns up again, dogging me. You’d think it would be easy, particularly in a …