The Magazine
The Fiction Issue
June 8 & 15, 2020
Close Encounters
Close Encounters
You Miss It When It’s Gone
Some of us waited a long time for a space largely free of threats. Some might not mind waiting a bit longer. Some of us don’t have time to wait.
Close Encounters
Let’s Get Small
In a romantic coupling, you turn inward, but friendships put you shoulder to shoulder to take on the world.
Close Encounters
Doing Nothing Isn’t Enough
I said, “Let’s pray.” He looked at me with a kind of insane hope, like maybe I had powers, maybe I knew God personally.
Close Encounters
The Smell of Doughnuts
I wandered in and out of bars, looking for someone or something to turn the night into an adventure, but all I found were a few more drinks.
Goings On
The Theatre
The Homebound Project’s Original Plays, Performed in Isolation
Diane Lane, Blair Underwood, and Phillipa Soo are some of the stars appearing in new short plays that will stream online.
Tables for Two
A Diner Turned Drive-In in Queens
The owners of Astoria’s Bel Aire Diner have adapted to the pandemic by hosting drive-in movies in their parking lot, where they serve such classic fare as mozzarella sticks and “Pulp Fiction” sliders.
The Talk of the Town
Jelani Cobb on the protests in Minneapolis; a nuclear-age time capsule; playing Staten Island; when Zoom seems passé; not invited to the party.
Platforms
Zoom Fatigue? Try Houseparty
Before the pandemic, the app was a mid-tier player in the video-calling leagues. Now, with fifty million new users and a Pictionary knockoff, it’s booming.
The Pictures
Bel Powley Adds Staten Island to Her Accent Repertoire
Preparing for her role as Pete Davidson’s love interest in Judd Apatow’s “The King of Staten Island,” the British actress drew inspiration from reality TV.
Dept. of Time Travel
A Reminder of “Duck and Cover” in a New Jersey Front Yard
David Mansfield, a former Dylan sideman, found a 1961 fallout shelter under his lawn. How did the danger sixty years ago compare with today’s threat?
Comment
Minneapolis, the Coronavirus, and Trump’s Failure to See a Crisis Coming
Like the coronavirus crisis, the riots following George Floyd’s death stemmed not from treacherous unknowns but from the Trump Administration’s failure to learn from even the most recent past.
Reporting & Essays
Letter from Reykjavík
How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus
The country didn’t just manage to flatten the curve; it virtually eliminated it.
Profiles
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work
The Asian-American literary pioneer, whose writing has paved the way for many immigrants’ stories, has one last big idea.
Fiction
Fiction
White Noise
Fiction
Pursuit as Happiness
Fiction
Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey
“Sharing a beer and chatting with a monkey was a pretty unusual experience in and of itself.”
The Critics
Books
What Is There to Love About Longfellow?
He was the most revered poet of his day. It’s worth trying to figure out why.
Books
Untangling Andy Warhol
The Pop iconoclast obsessively documented his life, but he also lied constantly, almost recreationally.
The Art World
Edward Hopper and American Solitude
Pandemic or not, the artist’s masterly paintings explore conditions of aloneness as proof of belonging.
Books
A Début Novel’s Immersive Urgency
In Megha Majumdar’s “A Burning,” a terrorist event transforms three lives—and the elements of a thriller are transmuted into prismatic portraiture.
The Current Cinema
“Shirley” Takes a One-Sided View of Its Subject
The film coats the author Shirley Jackson in gothic excess as if glazing a ham, and of her humor scarcely a shred remains.
On Television
Pleasure and Pain on HBO Max
Amid plastic simulacra of shows of yore, a documentary on sexual assault in hip-hop stands out.
Cartoons
1/13
“Pains me to say it, but Greg is much more interesting as a book.”
Cartoon by Avi Steinberg
Cartoon Caption Contest
The Mail
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.