Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule
Before it moved to The New Yorker:
Ask the Librarians archive
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Features & Columns:
Headline Shooter
On the Spot
Looked Into
Autobiography: Joshua Clark, “Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone” (Free Press); Edwidge Danticat, “Brother, I’m Dying” (Knopf); Joyce Carol Oates, “The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982” (Ecco); Sara Paretsky, “Writing in an Age of Silence” (Verso); Anna Politkovskaya, “A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia” (Random House).My boldfacing here is on the quick, arbitrary side; of course, others on this list have published pieces, poems, or stories in The New Yorker over the years.
Nonfiction: Philip F. Gura, “American Transcendentalism: A History” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Daniel Walker Howe, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848” (Oxford University Press); Harriet A. Washington, “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (Doubleday); Tim Weiner, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (Doubleday); Alan Weisman, “The World Without Us” (Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin’s Press).
Fiction: Vikram Chandra, “Sacred Games” (HarperCollins); Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead); Hisham Matar, “In the Country of Men” (Dial); Joyce Carol Oates, “The Gravedigger’s Daughter” (HarperCollins); Marianne Wiggins, “The Shadow Catcher” (Simon & Schuster).
Biography: Tim Jeal, “Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer” (Yale University Press); Hermione Lee, “Edith Wharton” (Knopf); Arnold Rampersad, “Ralph Ellison” (Knopf); John Richardson, “A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932” (Knopf); Claire Tomalin, “Thomas Hardy” (Penguin Press).
Poetry: Mary Jo Bang, “Elegy” (Graywolf); Matthea Harvey, “Modern Life” (Graywolf); Michael O’Brien, “Sleeping and Waking” (Flood); Tom Pickard, “ Ballad of Jamie Allan” (Flood); Tadeusz Rozewicz, “New Poems” (Archipelago).
Criticism: Joan Acocella, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” (Pantheon); Julia Alvarez, “Once Upon a Quinceanera” (Viking); Susan Faludi, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America” (Metropolitan); Ben Ratliff, “Coltrane: The Story of a Sound” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Alex Ross, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Hello! We're a small band of media enthusiasts, culture addicts, and journalists based in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Emdashes, formerly a New Yorker fan site, is our collection of conversations—mostly civilized—about magazines, movies, politics, design, punctuation, and other things that stir us.
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Dashes, some say, “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like an em dash itself—provides a thoughtful pause amid the hubbub.
Emdashes, founded in 2004, is written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. All posts before October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.
The site was designed by House of Pretty with illustrations by Jesse R. Ewing.
Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (author of our web comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The Emdashes pencil logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
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