Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Magazine Report: The Atlantic

Dec 2004 issue.

The chief fiction review is by Lorrie Moore, of a book by Alice Munro. Both are New Yorker writers whose bland literary styles are the same as they were 20 years ago. Cloistered worlds. Nothing new here. The magazine's a relic of a different era. Place it back on the shelf and scout for something better.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You dismiss New Yorker writers as if they all wrote about the same things, or at least similarly. I do not see that (for example) John McPhee's articles and Alice Munro's tiny epics about rural Canada have much in common. The demand for novelty implies that people who write well about one theme should take up other themes. Readers of Graham Greene or John Updike or P.G. Wodehouse would disagree.