By Marguerite Del Giudice American Fiction: Volume 13 October 28, 2014 When I lived on Loveland, I used to let that stupid fat thing next door put all her garbage and ashes on the side of my house. Rachel. For one thing they had coal heat and I had oil, and she would...
By Ron Rosenbaum The New York Observer December 6, 1999 O.K., I’ll play. You know, the Century-Slash-Millennium List Game. I admit I was reluctant to get into the whole Man -of-the-Century, Movie-of-the-Millennium enterprise. But a couple of things changed my mind:...
By Marilyn Johnson Life June 1, 1992 I didn’t want to be part of anything when I was a teenager, especially my family. There were seven of us, and they pressed in on me. So I buried my head in books. My reading irritated my parents; books were a narcotic I used right...
By Nora Ephron From Nora Ephron Collected November, 1986 I have been asked to write something for a textbook that is meant to teach college students something about writing and revision. I am happy to do this because I believe in revision. I have also been asked to...
By Helen Lawrenson From The Hussy’s Handbook 1944 A short time ago I had occasion to look into my magic mirror, which I had bought from a secondhand fairy godmother but had never gotten around to hanging up on account of the walls in my apartment were made of brick...
By Jennifer Allen New York Magazine July 18, 1983 The beautiful lady and the reporter sit facing each other on wicker sofas in the lady’s small but elegant Los Angeles office. They are silent, sheepish, like schoolgirls who have been collared in the hall by a teacher...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader May 4, 2020 Let’s take a moment to celebrate the one and only Gil Schwartz who passed away a couple of days ago. Some of his grief-stricken pals were kind enough to offer some of their memories and we are the richer for it. Take it...
By Ron Rosenbaum The New Yorker May 13, 2002 In 1997, when Harold Jenkins, the editor of the Arden “Hamlet,” a leading scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s play, went to see Kenneth Branagh’s film version of “Hamlet,” he was both excited and...
By Lawrence Wright Rolling Stone September 5, 1991 Is the Devil real? This certainly looks like the Evil One himself getting out of a black Jaguar and coming through the glass doors of a restaurant with a blonde on his arm. It’s an interesting proposition and one...
By Ron Shelton From Cult Baseball Players 1990 It was a groundskeeper in Stockton who first told me about Steve Dalkowski, the fastest pitcher of all time. Dalko once threw the ball through the wooden boards of the right-field fence, he said. The groundskeeper studied...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 23, 2020 John Huston was thirty-five when he made his directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon. He was 81 when he directed his last movie, The Dead. Which begs the question—has any director had a better start and finish? When...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 22, 2020 Most of us by now know someone who has died from COVID-19. I want to pay tribute to a victim of the virus. He lived in my building. Meyer was a short man with lively eyes. He was very old and irresistible. As a child,...
