The New Yorker unveiled The Page-Turner today. As if there aren’t enough blogs about lit things. They say the essays featured are “elaborations” on lit chit chat. What you do when you fight about or gush over a certain piece of writing with friends and colleagues and perhaps the stranger you meet at the bus stop. Imagine expanding those sort of exchanges into an essay. 

The inaugural pieces are:

Salman Rushdie on the spectre of censorship; a dissenting view on the immortality of “Death of a Salesman,” by Giles Harvey; Mary Norris on the subtle marvellousness of the medieval thorn; and Nick Thompson on the risks of the running life. Read more…

Anyway, I’m hurrying off to the books section of the UK Guardian, so I’ve only had the chance to read Rushdie’s piece. Is it old age or what? Why does Rushdie keep spouting these foofoo liberal cliches about freedom and creativity. Last time he was at Duke Uni, it was: “Man is a storytelling animal.” Today on Page-Turner it’s: “Liberty is the air we breathe.” And why is Rushdie spending three chunky paragraphs explaining how no one takes notice of the air we breath because it’s free, how creative freedom is, in a sense, like air, and how we need freedom to be creative?

Please Page-Turner, go easy on the token essays by big names. We’re hankering for genuinely lovely essays. Hope you deliver.

 

Photo Credit: Eiler, Lyntha Scott