Trending away from hardcovers

Some weeks my New Yorker shows up on Tuesday; other weeks it doesn’t arrive until the weekend. This week it showed up late, and that’s why I’m writing about it even as it’s being removed from news stands to make way for next week’s issue. But I was glad to finally get to it, especially after noting that it was the summer fiction issue. But it’s not the typical summer fiction issue and certainly doesn’t fit the accepted idea of “Summer Reading.” This issue is about war, and I’m glad that the New Yorker decided to put together an issue like this, since it is shockingly easy – three years after we invaded Iraq – to forget that this country is at war right now. It’s also fitting since we’ve been discussing war quite a bit at The Millions lately. Last month I reviewed An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson, which led readers to help me compile lists of World War 2 fiction and nonfiction. Vasily Grossman appeared on both lists, and his story “In Kislovodsk” (not available online) is in this New Yorker. Also contributing is Uwem Akpan with “My Parents’ Bedroom.” Akpan was in last year’s debut fiction issue.But more broadly, the issue is a nice reminder that as life goes on here in the States, war rages on in Iraq. The New Yorker has done this most vividly by providing “Soldiers’ Stories: Letters, e-mails, and journals from the Gulf.” The magazine has also created an audio slide show for the online version of the piece:This week, The New Yorker publishes a selection of letters, journal entries, and personal essays by soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines who served in the current war in Iraq. The writings are part of a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts called Operation Homecoming. An anthology of the work, edited by the historian Andrew Carroll, will be published this fall by Random House. Here, in an Audio Slide Show produced by Matt Dellinger, five of the servicemen read from their work, accompanied by their photographs.

Reuters’ “Oddly Enough” column ventures this week into the realm of literary history and intrigue: The mystery of Schiller’s skull. When he died of tuberculosis in his forties, Friedrich Schiller, the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet, playwright, and philosopher, was buried in a mass grave. Several decades later, the mass grave was dug up and Schiller’s skull identified by comparison with his death mask and its size, and placed in a more distinguished tomb in the city of Weimar. In 1911, the mass grave was turned up again and another skull found that was claimed to be the real memento mori. This second skull was also placed in Schiller’s tomb.Now, DNA researchers attempting to tell the true skull from the false by comparison with DNA samples taken from Schiller’s relatives, have discovered that neither is a match.In one of Lucian of Samosata’s second century Dialogues of the Dead, Diogenes tells Pollux that in death, “man and man are as like as two peas… when it comes to bare skull and no beauty.”So it would seem.

Remember those kids who obsessively drew their own comics on loose leaf in school? It should come as no surprise that Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem were furiously scribbling away in their notebooks during their pre-teen years. In the latest issue of Tin House – “The Graphic Issue” – the editors have collected boyhood comics from Chabon, Lethem, Dan Chaon, Luc Sante, and Chris Offutt (who also pens an introduction.) The comic juvenalia of these now well-known writers brought me back to my fifth grade class, where comics became a craze, and nearly every kid had created his own – on loose leaf of course – which we traded and read and discussed at length. My favorite amongst those collected here is Lethem’s brief opus “Fig-Leaf Man vs. Hot Dog King.”Unfortunately, none of the comics are available online, but the issue is worth a look as it includes graphic novel excerpts from Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken With Plums and other new works as well as appearances by Lynda Barry, Tom Tomorrow, and Zak Smith introducing his Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated (Read Garth’s recent post about the book). Also in the issue, short pieces by Anthony Swofford, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Stuart Dybek.