By Kevin Koczwara The Classical August 2012 When Glenn Stout says he lives far up there in Vermont he means it. The roads seem to go on forever and the mountains never end. Eventually, I make it to Lake Champlain and realize I’m getting close. I continue driving north...
By O’Connell Driscoll Playboy August 1982 The House on Stradella Road in Bel Air had tall iron security gates, which were standing open. Sitting in the center of the driveway—and blocking the entrance—was a black Cadillac limousine with darkened windows. A chauffeur...
By James Kaplan Vanity Fair August 1989 A fresh gale blows down the chute of Central Park and buffets the windows of Miles Davis’s hotel suite in midtown Manhattan. A romantic might hear songs in this wet wind, the ghosts of seven blocks south and forty years past,...
By Lewis H. Lapham Harper’s August 1995 “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening...
By Paul Slansky Playboy March 1983 It was a time when people walked the nation’s streets with orange-foam pads clamped to their ears and antennae bouncing above their heads. The newspapers of the day told of several thousand men and women who had allowed themselves to...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader November 14, 2019 If Mary Gabriel’s irresistible book about the mid-century New York art scene, Ninth Street Women, feels a little like a Robert Altman movie—with favorite characters weaving in and out of the story—it’s because she has...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader November 11, 2019 “When I was twenty-two, I read Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and it completely changed my understanding of what nonfiction can do.”—Rachel Aviv. Seven years ago, Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz, seniors at...
By Ron Rosenbaum The New York Observer January 17, 2000 Wait a minute, I’m not finished. I was just getting started. I’ve got more awards to bestow for Bests of the Century. I was just warming up last month when I named Pale Fire Best English Language Novel of the...
By Ron Rosenbaum Slate January 23, 2009 This may seem an odd moment to bring up the subject of Billy Joel. But the recent death of the painter Andrew Wyeth revived a long-standing debate over whether his art is respectable or merely sentimental schlock. (Say it: good...
By Tom Burke The New York Times March 22, 1970 Detroit She isn’t even mildly fatigued. For eight nerve‐shredding weeks, Lauren Bacall has been trying out her first musical, Applause, nightly belting a dozen songs in her big applejack‐brandy alto And swooping through...
By O’Connell Driscoll Playboy September 1979 “It’s One-Fifteen,” the man in the green-corduroy jacket said. “He was supposed to be here at one. My appointment was for one o’clock.” The man said this to a middle-aged woman who was sitting at a desk on the other side of...
By Paul Hemphill From Too Old to Cry San Francisco It is probable that Frederick Exley was the best-known unknown novelist working in America during the seventies. Ever since the publication in the late sixties of A Fan’s Notes he has symbolized the enigmatic position...
