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….
Over the past decade, my taste in literature—or at least my engagement with it—has shifted dramatically. I spend most of my “reading time” reciting charming and insufferable tales to my children. Curious George, for instance, is both the account of an irascible chimp unleashed in the big city and the chilling tale of interspecies abduction….
The night before my husband and I agreed to get married, we fought. It was a stupid and terrible argument. I’d planned a whole proposal for the next day: rented a rowboat, bought a bottle of champagne, measured his finger while he slept and had a wooden ring made. When he confessed, after a few…
In the Boston of inherited wealth, the five fetching Rotch daughters were raised in a Commonwealth Avenue mansion in the same Back Bay neighborhood as the Crosby and Bigelow families. The eldest daughter, Josephine, was engaged to marry Albert Bigelow the day after Bert’s graduation from Harvard. But when Josie and her mother sailed to…
On the occasion of Ray Bradbury’s one-hundredth birthday, we are still discovering the depth of his genius as his imagined future becomes our present. When Ray Bradbury began writing, the term magical realism hadn’t yet been invented. He was dubbed a fantasy writer, for those who wrote about magic or about the future or about…
I need you to tell the truth, to tell the mean stories, and to sing the song of hope. —Dorothy Allison, Skin What I remember, mostly, is the orange tag. It had no place for a name—just er visitor printed in sharp uppercase letters, so that’s who I became. For three days, I hid…
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