Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines
Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Our Daily Comic: The Wavy Rule
Archive: Ask the Librarians
Send us a question!
Frequently:
Headline Shooter
Seal Barks
Eustace Google
Looked Into
Lorrie Moore unlocks 'A Gate at the Stairs' September 17, 2009 By EMILY GORDON. Special to Newsday A GATE AT THE STAIRS, by Lorrie Moore. Alfred A. Knopf, 322 pp., $25. Lorrie Moore inspires fierce loyalty, for good reason: She's the sheriff of a wild and lonely territory, in which empathetic people fight despair with charming words. Her language -- its puns, musical refrains and catchphrases -- only partly hides the sadness behind it. The result is that kind of silliness that peaks just seconds before bursting into tears. The crises Moore addresses with high-spirited clowning have included romantic confusion, isolation, illness, death and even loss on a mass scale. Moore's new novel, "A Gate at the Stairs," artfully blends all these themes into a (continued)
Everybody Loves Rea Irvin
Filed under: X-Rea: Irvin Type Watch Tagged: art, books, contests, covers, David Remnick, design, Dorothy Parker, Eustace Tilley, illustration, Joseph Mitchell, Kevin Fitzpatrick, Liza Donnelly, nonfiction, Rea Irvin, typography
That's the headline for a story by me in the hot-off-the-presses Print magazine, in a special issue on type. Ever wonder who was behind Eustace Tilley--and hundreds more iconic images and visual features (including the famed "Irvin type")--in the first decades of The New Yorker? There's so much more to say about this spectacular moment in graphic history, and particularly about what came before it, but this is a start. And it was incredibly fun to write. Since I had limited space to acknowledge the many people who provided documents and contacts for the story, I'll give three grateful cheers here to cartoonist Liza Donnelly and to Dorothy Parker Society sagamore Kevin Fitzpatrick. They have both been incredibly generous with their resources and thoughts.
Very soon, we'll run the contest I mentioned the other day. It's a doozy! And I'll tell you what our interns will be up to this summer, too. And if you haven't heard about this, here's some welcome news about two new Joseph Mitchell reissues, one of which has a new introduction by David Remnick. I can't agree that Mitchell "is perhaps most remembered not for his writing, but for not writing," but there's never anything wrong with new readers for this peerless writer of New York's proud populations, human, aqueous, and otherwise.
(continued)
Lizzie Widdicombe: An Ingenious Talk Technique
Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: books, events, Lizzie Widdicombe, TOTT
Widdcombe covered a festive book event (Not Quite What I Was Planning). Each pithy phrase is subtly witty: It's no longer than six words. Appropriate for the book in question! I couldn't make the party, sadly. But I did contribute a tale. Oh, you'd like to hear it? "Do as say, not as did." (P. 180, in all its glory.) Another memoirist compiled a master list. Moved to write your short story? Show off your quick, dirty syntax.
(continued)
Review: "King's Gambit," by Paul Hoffman (Newsday)
Filed under: Clips Tagged: books, chess, nonfiction
KING'S GAMBIT: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game, by Paul Hoffman. Hyperion, 400 pp., $24.95.
By Emily Gordon
Chess brings out grandeur and brutality in its human players. Paul Hoffman, who's been deeply involved in the game since he was a child, is an intimate observer of -- as David Remnick put it in a recent interview with grandmaster Garry Kasparov -- "the absolute, singular concentration of a life bent over 64 squares." Hoffman's memoir, "King's Gambit," a chronicle of his and others' lives spent at that level of concentration, is as jagged, passionate and methodical as the game itself.
Hoffman (who ranks as a Class A chess player) is the former editor in chief of Discover magazine and president of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, as well as the author of two well-received nonfiction books about an eccentric mathematician and an early pioneer of flight. Hoffman clearly likes to gets his facts right -- this is a sturdy volume of carefully explained (and footnoted) details and digressions -- but it's chess that really grips his psyche. Its rules, characters and histories occupy his head, a labyrinth of positions and personalities.
Is that a form of madness? Throughout the book, Hoffman asks it directly. "Chess was an insane game," he writes. "When I lost, I was unhappy. And yet
(continued)
"It Can't Be Just Another News Site Flashing Headlines": The Newyorker.com Design
Filed under: Clips Tagged: design, interviews, newyorker.com
I interviewed esteemed Winterhouse designers William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, who worked with The New Yorker on the magazine's web redesign, as well as the web editors at Harper's, The Nation, and Scientific American.
It's all in Print, and, at a quality newsstand near you, in print.
(continued)
Who we?
Emdashes, founded in 2004 by Emily Gordon, 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.
Some writing by Emily Gordon
- Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (for Newsday)
- Annotated slide show: a wet, festive 2009 Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for nycgo.com)
- Proposal: A better-looking MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: Does a redesign of The New Republic mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: four online obsessives and visual cataloguers, Kate Bingaman, Nicholas Felton, Ellie Harrison, and John D. Freyer (for Print)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Interviews: winning New Visual Artists Eleanor Grosch, Zigmunds Lapsa, Christian Cervantes, and Kate & Camilla (for Print)
- Profile: lindy hop legend Frankie Manning (for Newsday, with Robert Fouch)
- Feature: Rea Irvin, illustrator, bon vivant, and The New Yorker's first art director (for Print)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (for Newsday)
- Review: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (for Print)
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Report: The New Yorker's redesigned website (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
- Interview: Matthew Diffee on the appropriately inappropriate cartoons of the The Rejection Collection (for Print)
- Interview: Roz Chast on Brooklyn, pysanky eggs, and animation (for Newsday)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Interview: Edward Gorey (for Newsday)
More clips.
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.
Founded by Emily Gordon, edited by Martin Schneider, designed by House of 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!