Recommendations from New Yorker writers.
Suddenly Something Clicked by Walter Murch If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, fewer than a half-dozen people have ever held “the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” one of them must be Walter Murch, the eighty-two-year-old editorial wizard who worked on the “Godfather” films, “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation,” and a dozen other masterpieces.
Murch’s new book, “Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design,” may take you weeks to read, as you stop to look at the movies that Murch dissects with meticulous verve. You will, for example, want to rewatch the scene of Don Corleone’s funeral, filmed at Calvary Cemetery, in Queens, once you learn that the background traffic noise was recorded at 3 A.M. on a Highway 101 overpass in the Hollywood Hills. The sound, Murch writes, was “lonely, with something strangely spiritual about it, like shimmering violins, or, sometimes, buzzing bees.” You may end up watching all of “The Conversation” in the wake of Murch’s tour-de-force account of its editing process. Francis Ford Coppola had not yet shot the entire script when he went off to make “The Godfather: Part II,” and it fell to Murch to fashion a coherent story from the extant footage. He compares the challenge to playing Tetris: it’s a matter of moving blocks around until a credible through line emerges. What elevates the film into the stratosphere, though, is Murch’s symphonic manipulation of music, sound, and noise. He studied the musique-concrète experiments of Pierre Henry, and adapted them so persuasively for narrative cinema that viewers seldom register how radical his methods really are. More than a raconteur, Murch is a cinematic philosopher who frames technical issues in terms that get at the nature of perception. What does it mean, he asks, that we used to spend half our viewing time in pitch blackness—adding up all the moments that the shutter on the projector blocked the light? What does it mean that we now see films in unrelenting daylight? “Has some mysterious edge been lost that engaged the imagination of the audience at the primal level?” Yet Murch is no Luddite: in the nineteen-nineties, he was quick to embrace digital technology, and he is now warily open to the possibilities of A.I. “You can’t control the weather during a revolution,” he writes. With a mind as sharp as his, you can, at least, keep pace.—Alex Ross Kaspar by Diane Obomsawin, translated from the French by Helge Dascher We writers are constantly bemoaning the death of reading. No one has the attention span for long stories! No one absorbs text the old-fashioned way anymore! Yet of all the books I read in 2025, my favorite was “Kaspar,” by Diane Obomsawin, a slender graphic novel of few words and simple grayscale drawings, that was published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009. This is Obomsawin’s take on Kaspar Hauser, a nineteenth-century German man who claimed to have grown up in a dark cellar, without any human contact. We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he’s around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: “The Man in Black.” The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside. Kaspar has never before stood up or seen celestial light. The man drops him off in the middle of Nuremberg, with a note addressed to a captain in the local squadron, promising him to the military corps. It takes a while for the world to figure out who, or what, Kaspar is. “He’s a madman! An imbecile! A half-savage! An impostor!” policemen guess, before locking him up. He becomes a curiosity. He gets passed from one custodian to another, including scientists and aristocrats, all around Europe. He falls in love with nature, and paints sought-after watercolors of flowers and fruit. “The day I see red apples,” Kaspar says, “I feel true satisfaction.” Obomsawin pulls from the historical record to create a distilled tragedy, and the result is an unforgettable little novel.—E. Tammy Kim Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain Rose Tremain’s slim, beautiful 2023 novel, “Absolutely and Forever” may be the book I’ve had the most success recommending to others in recent years: my husband, my daughter-in-law, my novelist friend who doesn’t always like what I like—all ate it up. Now it’s your turn, dear New Yorker readers. Tremain’s novel of youthful romantic obsession and painful growing up reminded me in its comic astringency of Muriel Spark, and, in its respect for the roiling emotions of one’s teens and twenties, of Sally Rooney. And because it deals with love and sex in nineteen-sixties England, telescoping enormous cultural changes into a small story that contains surprising depths and a heart-wrenching twist, it also made be think of Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” and Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.” Our narrator, Marianne, is fifteen when we meet her, a boarding-school girl in love with a vaguely arty boy named Simon, with “a dark flop of hair over his forehead.” Her mother tells Marianne that no one falls in love at her age—she has simply “manufactured a little crush.” It turns out to be more than that, and to resound long after she and Simon no longer see each other, when she has confected a new life in Swinging London , slept with other men and married a good one, grown close to her more grounded and intellectual friend Petronella, worked in a department store and as an assistant to an advice columnist. Likably incompetent and slightly stunned though she is, Marianne seems destined to become a writer—presumably, the writer Rose Tremain. That Tremain, who is now in her eighties and the author of many esteemed novels, could summon up the world of her youth—of youth in general—with such tender, precise affection strikes me as a small miracle.—Margaret Talbot After the Revolution by Amy Herzog Lately, I’ve found myself turning to plays. The spaciousness of the form is appealing, as is the total focus it commands: everything can turn on a silence, an interruption, the slightest cue. Also, plays are short, and I have a small child; when I have time to read, I want full immersion. Recently, I read Amy Herzog’s “After the Revolution,” from 2010, about a family forced to confront its own wobbly mythology. Set in 1999— “Clinton is a big-business president, the poor are getting poorer, racial divides are deepening, we’re dropping bombs in the Balkans, and people are complacent,” a member of the middle generation says, in a paternally baroque toast—the play turns around Emma Joseph, a recent law-school graduate and civil-rights activist, who discovers that her late grandfather, Joe, a committed “ideological communist” lauded for his silence during the McCarthy era, was politically compromised. As one might imagine, the members of the Joseph family have different perspectives on the gravity of this transgression. Rich, classic conflicts—between structure and agency; history and mythology; truth and protection, parentally speaking—emerge through intergenerational banter that made me laugh out loud in public spaces. Fine behavior in a theatre; stranger on the subway. A wonderful text for holidays spent around relatives with whom you cannot discuss politics—or, perhaps more riskily, around those with whom you can.—Anna Wiener Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris If you want to understand the background to the A.I. wave—a wave that might crash the American economy or the human species or, I suppose, somehow make us all rich and happy—then “Palo Alto” is a very good place to start. It’s an account of capitalism through the lens of this one town, beginning with the gold-rush era, and it is angry and incisive in equal measure. In Harris’s telling, Stanford’s Herbert Hoover is not the failure we remember him as but the architect of our present, where tech barons dominate the government that in a rational world might regulate them. The conservatism that Hoover represented meshed with a Stanfordian commitment to selecting the best and brightest, and they combined to produce the hothouse atmosphere that is Silicon Valley. Harris’s book is very long, and in some ways not exactly helpful—the alternative to billionaire-based capitalism he can imagine involves the various Maoist movements that bombed lots of stuff in the Bay Area during the sixties and seventies—but it sets the events of our time in a context that allows you to understand figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman as part of a deep, insidious tradition.—Bill McKibben
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