Mementoes of JFK
The assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 has become a cliché. We are overfamiliar with the Zapruder footage of the moment of his death in a way inconceivable to those who lived through it. Fifty years ago, “where were you when Kennedy died?” was a question to inspire hushed conversation about a...
Embarking on a bon voyage
Gentle Tweeter, The summer I spent on my nana’s farm upstate offered no end of diversions. Amusement could be found in, for example, shelling peas or shucking corn. A scintillating plethora of cherries offered themselves for the ready pitting. I breathlessly complained that I simply did not know where to begin. A lurching...
A mob of starlings and other inspirations
Alice McDermott’s latest novel Someone is a resonant study of an Irish-American family and its remarkable matriarch, and of changing lives and landscapes in 20th-century Brooklyn. Her first novel in seven years, it is her third to have been longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award. Where are you now? I’m at my desk, which...
Christmas Party
Harold Bilodeau’s ex-wife, Sheila, remarried, but Harold did not, and though he told people there was a woman down in Saratoga Springs he was seeing on the occasional weekend, he was not. Their divorce had been, as they say, amicable. She’d had an affair and fallen in love with Bud Lincoln, one of Harold’s friends...
Make way for the good stuff
Susan Choi is the author of the novels The Foreign Student (1998), recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award; American Woman (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize; A Person of Interest (2008), a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award; and most recently My Education (2013). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the...
Thinking and feeling
In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Susan Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion made it to print. Now Yale University Press has published a complete transcript of their conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. Sontag’s musings...
To the Holy Mountain
It was Holy Week when they found him. His wallet was missing, along with one of his shoes, but they were all drunk and Nick was always passing out in cathedrals, and so it took them fifteen minutes to realize he was dead. Dato woke me up by throwing oranges at my window; they shouted...
Cocaine and other addictions
In 1920, at the age of just twenty-seven, a young Italian named Dino Segre, writing under the pen name Pitigrilli, achieved overnight success and notoriety with a book of short stories called Luxurious Breasts, followed the next year by the novel Cocaine, and a second book of stories entitled The Chastity Belt. Although he was...
Sex Education
Daylight pries at my eyes. In a heartbeat, my focus shifts from a pleasant dream, instantly forgotten, to the red-pink glow that the sun sets off under my eyelids from behind the closed shades. I am aware of morning, of a bed sheet draped in bunches over me, of the warmth of late May –...
But not me
Reproduced below is the first letter Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., wrote to his family after being released as a prisoner of war in 1945. It recounts his witnessing of the firebombing of Dresden, an experience that would shape his later work including Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The horrors of war are delivered in a devastating deadpan and a...
Lolita in reverse
I spent the night before my first day of teaching in an excited loop of hushed masturbation on my side of the mattress, never falling asleep. To bed I’d worn, in secret, a silk chemise and sheer panties, beneath my robe of course, so that my husband, Ford, wouldn’t pillage me. He always wants to...
Doors
A robin has laid an egg in a hanging plant on the porch, and the wife doesn’t wish to disturb it. So she locks the front door and asks the husband to avoid passing through. Instead, he should use the side door, the one that leads through the mud room and into the kitchen, whenever...
