Merve Emre

New Haven

Shapiro-Silverberg Professor + Director of Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at @wesleyan_u. Critic, @newyorker. Special ops, @nybooks.

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Articles

What’s Not There | Merve Emre, Leo Carey

1 week ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre

Leo Carey is a senior editor at The New Yorker—in fact, he is my editor. He grew up in Oxford, England, where he attended the same school my children went to, St. Barnabas Primary School, and then the University of Oxford, where he studied English Literature. He moved to the US in 1997 and shortly after joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he has been for twenty-five years.
Catherine Lacey’s Infinite Regress

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Merve Emre

A Möbius strip, a looped surface with a single continuous side, is often formed by cutting a long, thin piece of paper and joining its ends with a half twist. The strip has no beginning and no end. You cannot distinguish its clockwise turns from its counterclockwise turns. It is impossible to separate inside from outside.
Catherine Lacey’s Infinite Regress

1 week ago | flipboard.com | Merve Emre

15 hours agoThe author talks losing faith, writing sex, and the makings of The Möbius Book, her part-memoir, part-novella exploration of the pain and joy of change. A Möbius strip is a looped, one-sided surface without boundaries, which a 2021 Scientific American article describes as “an artist’s reverie and a …
The History of Advice Columns Is a History of Eavesdropping and Judging

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Merve Emre

The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends).
Faustian Bargains | Merve Emre, Yahdon Israel

2 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre

I first started following Yahdon Israel through the Instagram feed of his Literaryswag Book Club, which he describes as New York City’s best-dressed book club. For almost ten years, Israel has convened a group of curious and stylish readers who have read over a hundred books together in an effort to reconcile the love of fashion with intellect. Or, as he puts it, “There’s always this dichotomy between ‘if you’re smart, you can’t really care about being fly.
Faustian Bargains

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Merve Emre

3 hours agoGenerative AI is breaking the dynamic that built the digital-publishing business. Since the mid-aughts, the link economy has defined how traffic moves across the internet. Publishers created search-optimized content, and Google (GOOGL), in its turn, sent traffic to their sites. This search traffic …
Close Listening | Merve Emre, Ben Calhoun

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Ben Calhoun |Merve Emre

The eighth episode of “The Art of Editing” May 27, 2025 In “The Art of Editing,” season two of the podcast The Critic and Her Publics, Merve Emre speaks with top magazine, newspaper, and book editors to discuss their careers and the work of editing. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of each episode. Ben Calhoun has been in love with radio since he was twelve years old. After college he began working at WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio...
Mischief in the Pages | Merve Emre, Sasha Weiss

1 month 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.
Past the Illusion | Radhika Jones, Merve Emre

2 months 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.
Satire and Sensitivity | Zakiya Dalila Harris, Merve Emre

2 months 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.