Inside the November 2024 Issue
Lauren Oyler on the Republican National Convention, Sean Williams on a Bougainvillean scam artist and fugitive king, Yiyun Li on minor characters, a story from Rosalind Brown, and more.
November 2024
[ R E P O R T ]
Revenge Plot
The GOP’s identity crisis
By Lauren Oyler
“Since Trump was elected in 2016, it’s been fashionable to think of all public behavior, committed by anyone, as an act, and to forget that these acts are also what produce a reality, for both the actor and those around him.”
[ L E T T E R • F R O M • B O U G A I N V I L L E ]
The Island King
A fugitive monarch dreams of fortune and freedom
By Sean Williams
“I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. He wore crowns of brass and cowrie shells that, lest there be any ambiguity, spelled out KING.”
[ E S S A Y ]
The Seventy Percent
On minor characters and human possibility
By Yiyun Li
“The point of writing and reading fiction is not to stay with the first thought or idea, nor the third or the fourth, but to push further until one says to oneself, Even though I haven’t thought through everything, I have brought myself as far as I can within my limited capacity. Without thinking through, thoughts are no more than slogans.”
[ M E M O I R ]
Ithaca
Rewriting my mother’s diaries
By Will Self
“For the writer, death is always a career move, and as she died, Mother, being a writer manqué, made a different sort of career move: having long since trained up an apprentice, I was charged with having the career she never did.”
[ S T O R Y ]
Discourse to Self
By Rosalind Brown
“This is what is so difficult to learn, to stop talking, stop anticipating, stop being vigilant in your ancient unnecessary way. The time as it passes isn’t it cool, and exquisitely textured like linen?”
[ R E V I E W ]
Dying Is a Form of Education
On Elden Ring
By Gabriel Winslow-Yost
“It is a game that seems to have decided that death is simply too important to be relegated to a matter of game design. If you’re going to play with it, you need to think about it too—to look at it, feel it, sit with it, and, perhaps most important, appreciate it.”
D E P A R T M E N T S
[ L E T T E R S ]
By Christopher Carroll, Annie Dillard, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Ralph Nader, Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, Marilynne Robinson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and others
[ P U B L I S H E R ’ S • L E T T E R ]
By John R. MacArthur
[ E A S Y • C H A I R ]
By Hari Kunzru
[ T H E • H A R P E R ’ S • I N D E X ]
[ R E A D I N G S ]
and more...
[ F R O M • T H E • A R C H I V E ]
By Luke Mitchell
By Dan Piepenbring
[ P U Z Z L E ]
By Richard E. Maltby Jr.
See the full table of contents
[ O N L I N E • E X C L U S I V E ]
The Letters of Lewis H. Lapham and Henry A. Kissinger
Read their full correspondence, never-before-published.
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