I had not visited The New Yorker site until today, but they have a nice fiction and poetry section. Two stories I read and liked are "Awake" by Tobias Wolff (visiting one of his favorite themes, the difficulty in growing up) and "The Dinner Party" by Joshua Ferris (timely because of finishing Mrs. Dalloway, but much more disturbing).
Theodore Dalrymple's short piece on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in City Journal: "Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked."
The life and times of Samuel Pepys in the Dublin Review of Books.
Man of a Thousand Faces: Joseph Tartakovsky reviews Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography), by Alberto Manguel.
How astonishing that, in a language we no longer know precisely how to pronounce, a poet or various poets whose faces and characters we cannot conceive, who lived in a society of whose customs and beliefs we have but a very vague idea, described for us our own lives today, with every secret happiness and every hidden sin.
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