Category Archives: Literature

On a Monday morning in March 2005, a reporter climbs to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and finds Molly Jong-Fast (b. 1978) at twenty-six, a cigarette going, a yawn breaking across a sentence, sharp through both. She lives … Continue reading →

Joanna Hershon (b. 1972) sits on the floor of her father’s study in Brooklyn, a girl not yet in her teens, reading about strangers. The book in her lap is the Harvard Red Book, the volume the university sends its … Continue reading →

A motel room in Nashville, early in the 1990s. Three high school girls share it for the weekend of a quiz bowl tournament. Two come from Mississippi. The third comes from Short Hills, New Jersey, and her name is Dara … Continue reading →

A graduate student sits at the seminar table at the University of Oregon with eleven pages he thinks are finished. Ehud Havazelet reads the first paragraph aloud. He reads it again, slower, and stops at a comma. He asks the … Continue reading →

In July 2019, on a family trip to Warsaw, Lauren Grodstein (b. 1975) followed a tour guide through the door of a building with a dull name. The Jewish Historical Institute stands on Tłomackie Street, a few steps from where … Continue reading →

A girl grows up in Sunnyside, Queens, and looks west. The Queensboro Bridge runs over the East River toward the city she wants. Behind her sit the brick courtyards of the garden blocks, the el train above the avenue, the … Continue reading →

Sometime around 1975, between the bachelor’s degree and the graduate program, Michael Cunningham (b. November 6, 1952) tended bar at a place in Laguna Beach. He had a Stanford degree in English and a stack of unfinished novels and no … Continue reading →

Their car boiled over again just after they crossed the Continental Divide. Rosemary Wolff steered the Nash onto the shoulder and let the engine cool. It was the summer of 1955. They had driven away from Florida and from a … Continue reading →

In her last year at Union College, Andrea Barrett (b. 1954) sat at the new electron microscope and looked at diatoms. The college had acquired the instrument not long before. Few undergraduates touched it. She did. She photographed the single-celled … Continue reading →

In May of 2012 a tall man from Oklahoma climbs the stairs to an apartment on the Upper West Side. Blake Bailey (b. July 1, 1963) has written to Philip Roth (1933–2018) and said he hears Roth wants a biographer … Continue reading →