#john-gil

#john-gil

Peter Hujar's first encounter with love at 16 involved an older man who he felt an immediate attraction to, marking the beginning of his exploration into relationships.

"The first step towards a cure is admitting you have a problem," artist Josh Kline writes, highlighting the inequities in New York City's real estate market and its impact on art.

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

I find England ugly...I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence...the food in England is like a jail sentence.

Tracy Kidder's gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did.

For Lowell There are things which, said and true, are of this generation's past; of fighting freedom's battles and of taking off the mask- stories of the actions taken, to blot out the blights of sin, how heroes and the valorous fought their enemies within, Would we be traitors to our bugle, which beckons with its call? - They won freedom for their people but in fine print said: be damned.

Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.

A crack of thunder, a flash of light, and a sulfurous mist flooded my apartment. Marax, President of Hell, stood before me. Marax entered my summoning circle, eyes burning with unholy fire, and I gave him the stack of homework to flip through while I brushed my teeth. Marax marked up the papers and fleshed out my bullet points into thoughtful feedback before I even got to my molars. Then-three hours of my life, saved!-I banished him back to Hell.

A writer is a kind of magician. Their job is to create living, three-dimensional people out of the ordinary stuff of ink and paper. This is no easy task, because readers can't literally hear, touch, or observe a character. Everything that defines a human being in real life-the physical space they occupy, or how they smell, feel, and sound-is stripped away, replaced by description. But authors have one major, mystical advantage: They can show you what's happening inside of someone's brain.

You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning's downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents' house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone.

Skip to main content Illustration by The New Yorker; Source photograph Michael Lionstar Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joseph O'Neill reads his story Light Secrets, from the January 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. O'Neill is the author of a story collection and five novels, including Netherland, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2009, The Dog, and Godwin, which was published in 2024.

Many editors languish in the margins of history, their contributions largely invisible despite how much they shape whom and how we read. But in recent years, amid a wave of books unearthing overlooked figures, biographers have turned their sights to pioneering book and magazine editors-including Malcolm Cowley of Viking, Judith Jones of Knopf, Bennett Cerf of Random House, and Katharine S. White of The New Yorker -anointing them as the unsung architects of the American literary canon.

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

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