In nonfiction, our winner is Madeline Vosch, for her essay “Undead.” This essay, nonfiction judge Paul Lisicky says, “is as much about the mystery of the life force as it is about the crisis of our time and how we fail the suffering. Every note is on pitch; there’s no excess, no unnecessary embellishment, and…
A good barbershop tells you who owns it, and that’s so with Blue Spark in Baltimore. Bill’s place is plastered with stickers advertising tattoo parlors and breweries and garage bands and the city itself: BALT superimposed over a rat. Skulls are popular, as are likenesses of Edgar Allan Poe. Bill calls Poe the city’s first…
The fall of 1991, as my boyfriend and I drove from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania to Virginia to West Virginia to Vermont and then all along the northern route through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California, the one consistent thing we witnessed from town to town and city to city…
My books, when I was a child, were populated with fairy godmothers, magic princes, wizards who would make your wishes come true with a wave of a wand or a few abracadabras. Inside these color-saturated pages, the characters took trips to far-off lands where spine-tingling adventures awaited. It was a fantasy beyond my own wildest…
“It was a dungeon,” Marvin Gilmore said about Boston State Hospital. “Like something out of medieval times.” Located on 232 acres of farmland, it began its therapeutic tenure in the late nineteenth century with promise, with the idea that a quiet pastoral setting outside the bustling city would do wonders for the lost and the…
One afternoon last week, I was sitting at my kitchen table, doing an online search for Bobby Bocelli. What came up was an entry headed: Robert A. Bocelli, 54, journalist, novelist, play and screenwriter. It sounded like an obituary. My second feeling was shame and guilt about my first feeling, which had been a flash…
In 1946, setting out to write the memoirs of his most remarkable life, Arthur Koestler walked into the Times publishing offices in Printing House Square London. In a small cubicle overlooking the Thames, while, as he said, a tugboat wailed longingly for the sea, Koestler examined the newspapers of the day, month, and year of…
Years ago, in the liminality of early transition, I worked a brief labor job. I hadn’t started hormones and looked like, what until recently I had been: a dyke. At the café where I hung out was a private contractor, with a crew of macho-seeming mostly Hispanic workers, doing construction and remodeling. He liked the…
I saw him when I entered the lobby. A tall man, sitting down. American or Australian or British. Young but not that young. Starting to bald. He had what the Japanese called a tall nose. When he stood, his body arched, then kept going, reminding me of a solitary egret, uncomfortable in rumpled feathered skin….
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