Roger Angell - the recently late John Updike’s editor at the New Yorker for 33 years - gives us the inside scoop about a genius at work.

As a contributor, he was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: “Which one sounds better, do you think?”

This process sounds old-fashioned, but Updike was probably the very first New Yorker writer to shift over to a computer, back in the early eighties. “I don’t know how this will change my writing,” he wrote to me in advance, “but it will.”

When I became his fiction editor, early in 1976, succeeding William Maxwell, I was alarmed to hear from him that his best fiction-writing days were probably behind him. This was nonsense; his output then was a steady three or four first-class stories per year, but to hear him tell it the end was near. “Fiction is a young man’s game,” he said querulously. I had not yet understood how much he loved sounding old.

The New Yorker will mail you a free copy of its inauguration issue cover by Drew Friedman, but you have to sign up by Saturday ( January 31). Sign up here.

The winter issue of one of my all-time favorite magazines, Lapham’s Quarterly (”Finding the present in the past, the past in the present.”), came out last month, and the theme this time is “Eros.” As usual, there are close to 100 text pieces from literary types, historical figures, and the occasional unknown - the contrib list this time includes Ovid, Flaubert, Goethe, Rumi, Nabokov, Nin, Dickinson, Henry VIII, a courtesan in India circa 1550, Aristophanes, Roth, Duras, David Foster Wallace, Foucault, Leonard Cohen, St. Augustine, Sappho, Aphra Behn, Kinsey, and Charles Mingus.

For an eclectomanic like me, each heavily illustrated 224-page issue (each one is really a square-backed softcover book) is an embarrassment of riches - a smorgasbord of ideas, insights, and experiences from across the millennia in one package for convenient mainlining into my brain.

Lapham’s posts only a fraction of each issue, apparently holding the strange belief that if you want to read a magazine, you should actually buy the magazine (I wonder if this approach will catch on).

One of the pieces they’ve posted for their sex issue is an extract from Hemingway’s memoir of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast. Papa is reassuring F. Scott Fitzgerald about his penis size after Zelda has attempted to psychologically destroy him. Here’s a portion:

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

“Come out to the office,” I said.

“Where is the office?”

“Le water,” I said.

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

“You’re perfectly fine,” I said. “You are okay. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.”