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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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.
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 … Read More
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, … Read More