Top of the Stack
Benching Himself
Rather than just another “old head” peering querulously at a new generation of players through the chain-link fence of a court he once ruled, the Wideman of Hoop Roots is a tortured solitary desperately looking backward, trying to collect enough of the past to give him strength in a darkening future.
Latest Exclusives
In the Country of My Disease
The delicate chain of memory crumbles, link by link, until there is nothing left. The family cannot continue if there is no common history, no shared memory. We become lost.
Hi-Diddely-Dee—The Writer’s Life for Me!
In an interview after winning the Nobel Prize, Saul Bellow contended that most people don’t pay any mind to writers, and his assessment struck me as correct.
The Stacks Chat: Mike Sager
“You’re picking up quotes and details and history. Assembling a mosaic. A found-art mosaic. That’s what you’re doing in this job—you’re getting all this stuff together.”
Down Great Purple Valleys
Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.
Mickey Rourke Doesn’t Smell
From Here to Obscurity with Mickey Rourke.
The Stacks Chat: Robert Benton
“Style is the most ephemeral thing I know. It’s not about how effective you are it’s about how you are effective. George Clooney has taste, Cary Grant had style.”
Magnificent Obsession
Dispatches from the set of ‘Titanic’
The Lady Eve
The One and Only.
The Stacks Chat: Chip Brown
Alex Belth Esquire Classic, 2016 Chip Brown has long been one of the finest magazine writers we have. An exacting reporter and a deft stylist, Brown began under the tutelage of David Maraniss and Bob Woodward at The Washington Post and flourished as feature writer for...
Death in Venice
On the Boardwalk with Deadwood’s Ian McShane: “Youth can always be overcome by wisdom and treachery.”
A Forgotten Pioneer of The New Journalism
Before Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, there was Thomas B. Morgan.
The Stacks Chat: John Edgar Wideman
“When you start out on a book, you’re hoping that when you finish you’ll be different. How different? What different? If you knew that you wouldn’t need to write the book.”