By Adam Hochschild From Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son 1986 1939. WAR CLOUDS OVER EUROPE. Molotov and Ribbentrop shake hands to celebrate their pact. Germany prepares for the roundup of the Jews. From the American Dust Bowl, thousands of destitute farm...
By Nik Cohn From Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom 1969 Next came the Fab Four, the Moptop Mersey Marvels, and this is the bit I’ve been dreading. I mean what is there possibly left to say on them? In the beginning, I should say, the Beatles were the Quarrymen, and then they...
By Red Smith The New York Herald Tribune October 4, 1951 Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible...
By Tony Kornheiser Street & Smith Basketball Annual 1975 Little Looie has his recruiting budget for the year spread out in front of him in little piles—100 subway tokens, 50 bus transfers, and two $5 gift certificates from Orange Julius. He’s on the phone,...
By Lucy Sante For The University of Chicago Press 2009 The Parker novels by Richard Stark are a singularly long-lasting literary franchise, established in 1962 and pursued to the present, albeit with a 23-year hiatus in the middle. In other ways, too, they are a...
By Donald Westlake From Writers on Directors 1999 Here are two things Stephen Frears said to me. The first was several months before The Grifters was made and, in fact, before either of us had signed on to do the project. We had just recently met, brought together by...
By Ellen Willis From The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll 1980 Janis Joplin was born in 1943 and grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. She began singing in bars and coffeehouses, first locally, then in Austin, where she spent most of a year at the...
By Todd Drew Bronx Banter November 7, 2008 The memories will not stop. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night and you have to walk. So you head down five flights to Walton Avenue. You pass the spot on East 157th Street where a batboy once found Satchel Paige...
By Richard Hoffer From A Savage Business 1998 At this time of year, at this time of morning, it was still dark. A small crescent moon hung in the Indiana sky and, beneath it, four helicopters balanced, as if some fantastic throbbing mobile had been constructed for the...
By Allison Glock GQ December 1995 I grew up in a house that had butter on the table and a pitcher of sweet tea in the fridge. The trees were filled with cicadas and Spanish moss, the heat was wet enough to bubble paint, and every young man strutted a worn white ring...
By Richard Ben Cramer Esquire October 1993 In England, recently, I learned the real definition of parochial. A law in the time of Elizabeth I restricted you to your own parish. If you did leave, and ran into trouble elsewhere, you were literally whipped home: That is...
By Brad Darrach Life December 1987 Meryl Streep is gray with cold. In Ironweed, her new movie, she plays a ragged derelict who dies in a cheap hotel room, and for more than half an hour before the scene she has been hugging a huge bag of ice cubes in an agonizing...
