Manhattan
A precocious protagonist: Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart, reviewed
No wonder clever ten-year old Vera is suffering intense anxiety in Manhattan, what with problems at school, her birth mother vanishing and the wider American world in turmoil
Musings in lockdown: The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed
Marooned in Manhattan with a stoned student and precocious parrot for company, our elderly narrator despairs of the novel’s future when life is so much stranger than fiction
Hustlers and hoodlums
For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place…
A man with a plan for Manhattan
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…
Bill de Blasio unites cops and protesters — in disgust
New York City is crumbling into shambolic lawlessness and its citizens are growing more afraid and frustrated by the day.…
Mayhem in Manhattan
It’s important — and easy — to tell the difference between protesters and looters. Just as New York should have…
An education in love: City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert, reviewed
One of the chief regrets of book-loving women of my age — and a surprising number of men — is…
To reflect on the brilliance of your writing, you had better be sure of its brilliance
Nominative determinism is the term for that pleasing accord you occasionally find between name and profession: the immigration minister named…
Born again: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences —…
Art and aspiration
When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and…
The trouble with mothers
For a child, the idea of ‘knowing’ your mother doesn’t compute; she’s merely there. As an adult, there may be…
High life
I have finally moved into my new flat, a jewel of a place in a pre-first world war Park Avenue…
Love, loneliness and all that jazz
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
The rich are a different species
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…
Long life
In 1993, when I was living in Manhattan working for the New Yorker magazine, I was chosen as ‘distinguished visitor’…
The problem with trying to resuscitate dying languages
Samantha Ellis 9 March 2024 9:00 am
Ross Perlin is determined to support the ‘last speakers’ of endangered tongues, such as Seke. But if these speakers really are the last, they are not, in any real sense, speaking