Merve Emre

1 week ago | nybooks.com | Sasha Weiss |Merve Emre

Sasha Weiss is the first editor I ever worked with on a reported piece, at the time a new type of assignment for me. I was writing about the mysterious Elena Ferrante and I was entirely unsure of what to do, but I soon discovered that I could put my faith in Weiss as part teacher, part therapist: She has a unique way of pushing her writers, forceful yet compassionate.

3 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Radhika Jones

For the past seven and a half years, Radhika Jones has been the editor in chief of Vanity Fair. When she agreed to come speak with me for “The Art of Editing,” I was imagining we would talk about the annual Hollywood Issue or whether the magazine had another scandalous exposé of Cormac McCarthy up its sleeve. But one week before our conversation, she announced that she was stepping down.

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Zakiya Harris

What happens when editors become the subject of satire? Zakiya Dalila Harris, who began her career as an assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday, is the author of the 2021 novel The Other Black Girl, a work of speculative fiction whose protagonist, Nella, is the only black girl, or OBG, to work as an assistant editor at a prestigious publishing imprint—until one day she notices a colleague she hadn’t before.

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre

I Am Charlotte Simmons, which many people believe to be Tom Wolfe’s crudest and most offensive book, played an important part in my moral education. When I think about the novel now, I think about a girl who used to go to the college bookstore for the express purpose of reading it. She would pick it up from the front display table, climb to the balcony, and sit on the floor behind a large white column that was broad enough to hide her from the clerks and the customers below.

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Fergus McIntosh

Fergus McIntosh is head of the fact-checking department at The New Yorker. He is also the first fact-checker I ever worked with at the magazine, for an essay about Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Working with McIntosh and the members of his team over the last five years has taught me how attentive, precise, and probing fact-checkers can be. Their department has also taught me what, exactly, a fact is.