Nonfiction

  • What’s A Story?

    i Thrusting from the head of Picasso's goat are bicycle handlebars. They don't represent anything, but they are goat's horns, as night is a black bat, metaphorically. Come into the garden. . . . . .the black bat night has flown. Metaphor, like the night, is an idea in flight; potentially, a story: There was…

  • A Weed Among the Flowers

    I little knew the turbulent time which lay ahead of me when on the telephone my friend Margaret Lane invited me, subject to the consent of the Chinese authorities, to join a little party including herself and her husband for a month's visit to China in April 1957. It was during that deceptively hopeful season…

  • Study for Sleep (cover)

    What's A Story Mary Ward Brown Rosellen Brown Robert Cohen Carol Cosman Louise Glück Brenda Hillman Rhoda Huffey Jeff Hush August Kleinzahler Phillip Lopate Thomas McGuane Sue Miller Oscar Pemantle Mary Peterson Edgar Poma C. E. Poverman David Reid Danny Romero Roger Salloch Jean-Paul Sartre Gary Soto Edited by Leonard Michaels ISSN 0048-4474

  • Against Joie de Vivre

    Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu…

  • Trailed By The Black Dog

    When V. S. Naipaul was a toddler growing up in Trinidad, his grandmother sold marijuana. Only old people bought it, for, during the early 1930s in Trinidad, only the elderly, whose energies were depleted and for whom life had become boring, desired to smoke hemp. Naipaul told this story to his students at Wesleyan University…

  • The Secret Sharer

    . . . A couple of thousand men scattered throughout the great European cities. A few of them are famous; a few write unusually arid, consciously frightening and still peculiarly moving and gripping books; a few, shy and proud, write only letters, which will be found fifty or sixty years later and preserved as moral…