Mickey Rourke Doesn’t Smell

By Scott Raab GQ July 1995 Lost inside a huge sweater and a baggy, low-slung pair of jeans, an oversized brown fedora slumped well down on his forehead, half walking, half leaning against a young woman with long brown hair, actor/boxer Mickey Rourke trudges down a...

The Stacks Chat: Robert Benton

By Alex Belth Esquire Classic August 2016 Robert Benton is best known as a screenwriter (Bonnie and Clyde, What’s Up Doc?,and Superman), and director (The Late Show, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Nobody’s Fool), but before he lost it at the movies, Benton was the art...

Magnificent Obsession

By John H. Richardson Premiere December 1997 “I’m getting bored here,” Cameron is saying. “I went for popcorn 10 minutes ago.” He is speaking into a handheld cordless microphone, his voice booming down from the astonishingly crisp overhead speakers like the voice of...

The Lady Eve

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Around these parts, we are enormous Eve Babitz fans. Would we belong to a fan club? You bet we would. Proudly. If you don’t know from Babitz, not only is she a wonderful writer but she’s lived some kind of life, all of which is detailed...

The Stacks Chat: Chip Brown

By 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...

Death in Venice

By Steve Oney Los Angeles Magazine May 2005 “The boardwalk squeaks and out come the freaks,” declares Ian McShane, plainly including himself in the assortment of street preachers, panhandlers, and body builders gathered at Venice Beach on this foggy spring morning....

A Forgotten Pioneer of The New Journalism

By Alex Belth Esquire Classic October 2016 Fame is fleeting in all pop culture—movies, music, writing, sports: today’s stars, tomorrow’s Where Are They Now’s. This feels especially true in journalism. Who but a small group of nonfiction-loving nerds pays attention to...

The Stacks Chat: John Edgar Wideman

By Alex Belth Esquire Classic October 26, 2016 The story of Emmet Till is embedded in our public consciousness as one of the most notorious hate crimes of the century. What is lesser known—and what novelist John Edgar Wideman tackles with candor and humility in his...

Brooke on the Brink

By Stacy Title New York Woman October 1990 The very sight of Brooke Shields, the six-foot icon slash model slash actress, puts people into shock. Whatever they’re doing, they stop. Here in the Pan Am terminal at La Guardia, wearing a fitted, floral dress—magenta and...

The Young and the Homeless

By Stacy Title New York Woman September 1987 There is a subculture of the homeless in this city whose membership is growing at an alarming rate. Like their more familiar elderly counterparts, they live off the city’s excesses—unwanted canned food, jangling change, and...

The Long, Slow Fall of a Gridiron God

By Loren Feldman GQ December,1988 Art Schlichter is scrambling. Running late, headed from his father’s farm in Bloomingburg, Ohio, to the Springfield Antique Show and Flea Market, he flips on his Road Patrol XK radar detector and hits the gas, challenging the two-lane...

Getting it Straight

By Sue Woodman New York Woman January/February 1987 Last year, 1,806 women in America had AIDS, 794 of them were from New York City. Most of us may not yet be aware of this grim new reality, but it is becoming increasingly pervasive. Today, AIDS sufferers are no...