Tuesday, June 17, 2008


THE NEW YORKER
DOUBLE SUMMER FICTION ISSUE JUNE 9 & 16
Ironically humorous I guess you could call the cover of this wonderful issue that hit my mail box today and resulted in me losing almost three hours of worktime as I ploughed through this fat 136 page edition with its emphasis on fiction.
The cover shows an independent bookstore owner arriving at work just as his neighbour receives a courier package from Amazon! A visual message?
The brilliant and thought-provoking cover aside this is an issue that all fiction lovers should read. Fiction by Annie Proulx, Mary Gaitskill, and Vladimir Nabokov, along with extensive book review coverage, a hugely entertaining story by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami entitled The Running Novelist, (worth buying this issue just to read this story), and an emphasis among the cartoons on fiction as well. My favourite shows a bearded, bespectacled, waist-coated man saying to a woman at a cocktail party, "The key to being a writer is to take all the sadness and turmoil deep in the center of your being and channel it into a diet cookbook".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is such a clever cover. I've seen it in the flesh so to speak. A good example of how an artist (and cartoonist, for that matter) has to think about the best possible way of presenting the idea. As with most art, the concept is one thing, the execution of it is where the really hard work comes in.