THE NEW YORKER - Issue 27 April 2009

The Obama's dog, Bo, may end up becoming a very famous dog. Already there is a children's book about him and now here he is on the cover of The New Yorker. Great cover.
Lots of other interesting stuff in this issue too, among them a poem by Franz Wright, Sketch for a Novel, which is reproduced below. Wright is a Pul;itzer Prize winning novelist for his collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard, and an excellent, long piece by Jill Lepore of Harvard University on Edgar Allan Poe.


Sketch for a Novel
by Franz Wright

Chapter minus two hundred and fifty
in which the author pays (and pays for it,
as always) a visit to one of the lost: I

dropped by the dark house with no furniture,
knocked, and was introduced to her mother,
a woman much younger than she was

and for obscure reasons known only to
no one had kept her from childhood on
locked in the oven, &c. At this time

they were living together or, hard to say,
dying, possibly from a mystery
condition which fuelled and quite vivified

their blunt if obsessively honed and
devotedly mutual hatred
and hissing contempt: classic case of

the weapon lying down with the wound?
From the first I had no problem picturing
(and would have preferred to eat decaying

fish and live, rained on, under a bridge)
what would happen if harm came to one of them,
should indeed anything this side of murder

slash suicide occur, although if that did
it was anyone’s guess which event would
come first. In a flash you could see it:

all hostilities concluded, and their own
miniature World War III’s aftermath,
and the all-out final progressive and

uninterrupted commercial-free
stone-cold muttering psychosis awaiting
lone survivor of this conflict, the end.