When I am stuck on something I’m trying to write and have exhausted all the other options—ignoring the problem, staring blankly at the problem, moving the problem around to see if it’s less annoying in some other location, eating all the chocolate in the house—I eventually do what I should have done in the first place and go read some writer who is much better at this business than I am. The candidates are legion. But, from the whole long, idiosyncratic list of authors I regularly turn to for intellectual and aesthetic resuscitation, one of the most consistently useful is Norman Maclean. If you know Maclean, it is likely because of his first work, “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories,” a triptych of tales—about, among other things, families, fly-fishing, love, death, and a time when virtually all hard work in this country was still done by hand—that was published to enormous acclaim and considerable astonishment when the author was seventy-three years old. For many years before that collection appeared, in 1976, Maclean had tried to write a book about the Battle of Little Bighorn. For all the years afterward, until his death, at eighty-seven, he worked on a book about a different tragedy on a hillside—a wildfire in Montana that killed twelve smoke jumpers and a forest ranger—which was published, posthumously, as “Young Men and Fire.”
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Denne historien er fra July 08, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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TAKE TWO
\"The Hills of California\" and \"Yellow Face\" come to Broadway.
DOWNWARD SPIRALS
Missy Mazzoli's \"The Listeners\" and Jeanine Tesori's \"Grounded.\"
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
The exuberant, complicating drawings of the Shakers.
THE LONG CON
Rachel Kushner's anti-spy, anti-realism novel.
IF MEMORY SERVES
John Lewis knew how to put a legacy of heroism.
SILICON VALLEY'S INFLUENCE GAME
From crypto to A.I., tech titans are pouring money into super PACS to savage their political opponents.
WHEN THE ICE MELTS
What the fate of the Arctic means for the rest of the Earth.
SLEEP ESSENTIAL FOR HEALTH
To achieve good health, you must maintain a regular sleep schedule, and be able to get back to sleep once you are awake.
THE K-POP KING
Chairman Bang is bringing his formula for creating idols to the U.S.
THE SIGHTED WORLD
Growing up with the writer Ved Mehta.