The Oct. 20 New Yorker features a dog on the cover, about to do a cannonball into a pile of leaves, and more stories inside than I have read in a single issue in a long time. There is an entertaining appreciation by Anthony Lane of the half-forgotten poet Violet Ranney Lang and a typically thorough (i.e. long) profile of Zohran Mamdani. I even read the fiction, a quiet but strangely compelling story about a friendship between two writers. The two things I usually enjoy, “Shouts & Murmurs” and “Takes” – in which a current writer pays homage to a classic from the past – I found unmemorable. The article that really interested me was the review of the new biography of Peter Matthiessen. Best known for The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen held his novels in higher esteem. “Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet,” he's quoted as telling the Paris Review. “It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture.”
