Nonfiction

Sometimes, after my daily dose of radiation, I would stop at a small bath store near the hospital to buy a bar of soap, perhaps, or a bottle of bath gel. I liked the little shop; it was holding its own among the retro hippie emporia of the neighborhood, no hint yet of tea tree…

I am in Dublin having dinner with an Irish man of whom I am quite fond. “Am I wrong in saying your family owned a sweet shop?” I ask him. “Well, it was more than a sweet shop. It was a place that made all sorts of candies and some small cakes and what you…

I sometimes encounter ex–baseball fans (invariably middle-aged men) who tell me they have given up following the sport because of the steroid scandal, the huge salaries of the players, the duplicity of the owners—“It’s all become just a big business,” or some such explanation, which they deliver in a tone of principled disgust. I listen…

I thought I’d grow up to be a scientist. As a child I was infatuated with pet mice and guppies and studying trees from the shapes of their leaves. And don’t I remember, as a kindergartner, being ushered into the school basement to watch on TV the Russian satellite, Sputnik, soaring into outer space? We…

In Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” you end up in a classroom where everything dies. The orange trees, the snakes, the tropical fish, the salamanders, the puppy, the Korean orphan, the grandparents, the parents, even some of the students. In just two pages, the story has the momentum of a howitzer, piling the bodies up in…

From my diary, April 22, 1994: …came home to the news that Richard Nixon, a man who let me down again and again, and to whom I felt deeply connected—whether I was wearing a Nixon-Lodge button at the age of 9, or having a shouting match with my father over the Cambodian invasion ten years…

At the beginning of the third book of the Odyssey, Telemachus’ ship pulls into the harbor of sandy Pylos, as the morning light burnishes the sea. Homer tells us: The sun rose from the still, beautiful water Into the bronze sky, to shine upon the gods And upon men who die on the life-giving earth….

Last summer, with a serial rapist roaming Ann Arbor, I asked my undergraduates to read an essay called “In the Combat Zone” by Leslie Marmon Silko, in which she argues that if women felt comfortable using firearms, they wouldn’t present such passive victims for men intent on harming them. One of my female students, fair…