Nonfiction

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…

excerpts from a memoir in progress Near the end of your cremation, when your blood and eyeballs, skin and muscle, organ meat and marrow have vaporized up the smokestack into the wind above this river-hugging corridor populated by machine shops and body shops, an adult bookstore called Fantasy Island with a cartoon palm tree on…

She had just won a major literary prize. She was slim, blond, and preposterously attractive. I was slim, blond, and preposterously awkward. Somehow I’d gotten into her poetry writing class as a first-semester freshman. I’d submitted a sonnet about a monk so consumed with sexual longing that he couldn’t pray. The monk was me, and…

You have been sent for and now you must memorize a name. A new name. A borrowed name. Nine thousand feet above sea level, the options are laid out before you: Get the name right and you see your parents again; get the name wrong and you never see them again. It’s that simple. The…

1. According to the Talmud, only three sins in Jewish law are so serious they are forbidden under any circumstances, even to save a life. These are murder, idol worship, and adultery. But in many interpretations, there is a fourth sin, equal to, if not worse than, these: lashon hara—literally, “evil tongue.” It is said…