He’s old, Stieglitz is, when I’m looking at this photograph in my dining room. It’s one hundred and forty-three years since he was born, but he’s still hunched over his desk in his little, crowded gallery like he was when I was born. In this white-framed ...

In writing about the pillow fight that took place on Friday, April 17 in front of the Frist Campus Center, I feel it is my duty to report as accurately as possible the events that transpired up to and during those ten idyllic minutes of being bathed in feathers. The following report is as honest and strictly detailed as my mind would allow.

My father stands roasting in his black neoprene wetsuit, a surfboard jammed under each arm so that he looks like he might just take off at any moment. In his face I find memories, sewn in amongst the creases and the tufts of gray, there to be dug up and ...

There are few greater honors for the writer than to meet the King of Sweden. This, of course, comes after one wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, joining the ranks of Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Bellow and Neruda. The King of Sweden. The King of Sweden. On October 7, Joyce Carol ...

I haven’t been young in a very long time, at least in the sort of way Max is in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. That book, which sits on my bookshelf at home with a tattered cover and a note from the author to my six-year-old ...

The grass is trimmed like my father obsesses over. It’s green as Heineken bottles, as my mother’s eyes when shining with tears, and the white lines that frame it up and down stand out like Claire’s porcelain skin at Ricky’s son’s baptism.

In Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel American Pastoral, his protagonist, a Jew named Seymour Levov who goes by the nickname “the Swede,” sees his life turned upside down when his daughter turns terrorist and blows up a post office. Before that, the Swede was living the American Dream ...

Roman Polanski has lived one of the most fascinating lives of the last century, though it would be hard to call it “good.” Such a title ought to be reserved for more pleasant, straightforward existences that perhaps begin modestly and end with a substantial list of quality works and a ...

There was a bit of marinara sauce spilled out on the counter in a cluster of islands. Four blotches of red, decreasing in size and arcing away from the stovetop like Hawaii. The sauce was cold and was slowly drying up, and soon it would take a sponge and some ...

In my house there is a library. It used to be called the playroom, back when I was very small and very young and learned what Don Quixote was by watching the Wishbone episode. It was a library then, too, but I didn’t really notice. It has shelves for ...

Wes Anderson has always been a divisive filmmaker. There are those who revere him and those who think all his films are simultaneously overwrought and underdeveloped. But whatever you may think of him, it is hard to deny that he has style, and that he does what he likes. And ...

Sarah Palin is the politician Jonathan Swift would have imagined for this century if he were living in it. An attractive woman with some sort of strictly defined set of morals, she has exploded onto the scene because she is a masterful spin doctor, a skilled manipulator of her image ...

Jonathan Safran Foer has had a trajectory in the publishing world that is close to ideal. In 2002, at the age of 25, he published Everything is Illuminated, a novel that developed out of his senior thesis at Princeton where he was a philosophy major. The book was a major ...

One of my favorite pieces of writing that I’ve ever read is “Pafko at the Wall,” a novella by Don DeLillo that also serves as the opening to his massive novel Underworld. The story is about “The Shot Heard ‘round the World,” New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thompson’s ...

Recently I went to a reading by the Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart at Labyrinth. He
was reading from his new novel Super Sad True Love Story, a widely praised satirical novel
about the very near future. Shteyngart is a young writer. Born in 1972, he appeared this summer
in The ...

The short story form is a special kind of animal. It is the form that students of fiction are made to learn first, as though crafting a finely-spun tale of less than twenty or so pages is the first step toward tackling the beast that is the novel. But this is mostly nonsense.

Editor’s note: The following is a brief selection of a running diary of Game 2 of the Knicks-Celtics playoff series, played on April 19, 2011 at TD Banknorth Garden in Boston.

Shakespeare asks the big questions and sometimes he answers them. In Romeo and Juliet he asks about love, often.

Sections excavated from short stories going nowhere.

The link above the rest of the page was fresh and in red. It was urgent, it seemed. “J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, dies at 91.”