Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines
Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Weekly: Pick of the Issue
Bimonthly: Ask the Librarians
Submit a question for the next column.
Frequently:
Headline Shooter
Seal Barks
Eustace Google
Looked Into
NYC Opera: Do "Kugelmass" Next!
Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: Alex Ross, Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain, fiction, John Ashbery, John McPhee, movies, music, opera, Paul Auster, poetry, Salman Rushdie, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Woody Allen
Martin Schneider writes:
AP reports that the New York City Opera has commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on "Brokeback Mountain," the short story by Annie Proulx that I believe someone made into a movie a few years back. I presume that this is the first operatic work based on material that first appeared in The New Yorker, although you never know, maybe there's an oratorio based on John McPhee's "Annals of the Former World." This list of Wuorinen's works looks fascinating—there are adaptations of work by John Ashbery, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, and Dante, among others.
Update: Looking at that list of works, I'm not a bit surprised that Alex Ross has written about Wuorinen before.
Who we?
Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.
We welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.
No fear: Everything you say or send is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.
This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.
A few clips
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
Tell me more
They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.
Primary sources
The New Yorker
Events listed by the magazine
Web resources: New Yorker writers and artists
Books, Organizations, &c.
Edited by Martin Schneider, designed by Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
The Rossosphere
- Resistance Is Fertile
- Mick Stevens: I Really Should Be Drawing
- Cartoonist Michael Maslin's homepage
- Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
- Sasha Frere-Jones
- Matthew Diffee's HuffPo blog
- The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s
- The essential Jane Grant
- Paul Noth's Pale Force
- The New York Public Library records
- New Yorker Comment
- Chiasmus in The New Yorker
- Wikipedia: The New Yorker
- New Yorker database
- The New Orcer
- Silence of the City
- Between the Squibs
- Blog About Town
- Newyorkette
- New Yorker Anti-Caption Contest
- The New Yorker Forums
- I Hate the New Yorker
- Ben Yagoda's homepage
- Access My Library
- New Yorker haiku
- Modern Spectator
- Map: Caption Contest Winners
- Technorati: New Yorker
- Link to suggest? Email it!
Comments
The mind boggles at the possibilities, Martin. "The Lottery," perhaps? Capote's "In Cold Blood" would be too easy, as would Hersey's "Hiroshima" (as compared to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring") -- and on the fiction side, "Franny" and "Zooey" are practically arias already. No, what's wanted (after "The Kuglemass Episode," of course) is a version of Barthelme's "The Indian Uprising," say, or Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here."