Bye, Buy Brownstone

Remember when Lucy tells Charlie Brown that all she really wants for Christmas is real estate? I get it now. From this week’s Briefly Noted review of “The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn,” by Suleiman Osman: Today, Brooklyn real estate is among the most expensive and coveted in the nation. Read this week’s Brieflier Noted to […]

Short Order

Every few years, fiction readers are warned about the death of the short story. But there are loyalists to the genre—this magazine among them—and work continues to be published for those who know where to look. Storyville, an app available for iPhone and iPad, joins the push on the electronic literary front by giving its […]

Between the Lines

Earlier this month, Shaun Usher—a freelance copywriter and the man behind Letters of Note and Letterheady—launched Scaffoldage, a site devoted to the beauty of scaffolding. Photographs of construction and restoration sites as varied as the New York World’s Fair, an ancient Chinese palace, and a water tower in England feature latticeworks of scaffolding that, in […]

Time’s a Goon

I think the New Yorker Book Club discussion technically started last week with Kate’s report on the “Eat, Drink, and Be Literary” event with Jennifer Egan and the New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, at B.A.M. “I became interested in Bennie while writing about Sasha, and interested in Bennie’s ex-wife while writing about Bennie … […]

Lessons

On September 2, 2001, I arrived in Rome for a semester abroad. My pensione’s lone TV didn’t get any English stations, and my Italian wasn’t good enough for me to make sense of the newspapers. As a result, I spent most of that fall in a state of hyper self-awareness, intuiting the season’s events in […]