Thursday, July 12, 2007

Good mail

A good day for my mailbox today: no bills or junk, Poetry, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. All that kept it from being a perfect day was the absence of an acceptance (or, in the absence of an acceptance, at least a copy of Light Quarterly to guarantee my reading pleasure until Harry comes out next week).

In Poetry (the July/August issue), Brad Leithauser, Wendy Cope, and Richard Wilbur are among the many writers whose work I look forward to reading. In the New York Review (the July 19 issue), Freeman Dyson, Ian Buruma, Garry Wills, Tim Parks, and Thomas Powers all have essays, AND there is an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee's forthcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year (which is listed as "to be published by Viking next January, but is being published by Harvill Secker in September). In the New Yorker (July 9 & 16), there's another Tim Parks essay, as well as an essay by Louis Menand.

Where to start?? I ended up starting with the New York Review, and the opening essay by Dyson. A great read over soup for lunch.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I thought the Garry Wills review of the biography of William James (in the NYRB) was a great read. I liked the review so much I ordered the book.

Garry Wills is a genius.

Andrew Shields said...

Wills's writing is consistently superb. I haven't read any of his books, but I have been a fan of his NYRB essays for a long time now.

A few years back, Josef Joffe wrote an article in the German weekly "Die Zeit," in which he decried the absence of a European magazine that all European intellectuals would read, regardless of their own native language. He said that the only way any given European intellectual could reach every other European intellectual was to write something for the NYRB!

Donald Brown said...

boy I envy you your mail! I guess I need to cough up cash and subscribe to something...