By John Schulian The Stacks Reader June 18, 2024 The news out of San Francisco says Willie Mays is dead at 93, as if death can contain a virtuoso of his grass-stained, sweat-soaked magnitude. Death is a past-tense proposition and everything Mays did on a baseball...
By John Schulian The Stacks Reader June 17, 2024 I counted Mike Downey as a friend for 47 years, and the only time he let me down was Wednesday. He had as big a heart as the laws of physiology allowed, a 24-karat, 18-wheeling, let’s-go-to-the-circus thumper that was...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader January 22, 2024 When Carl Fischer passed away last year, there were a handful of appreciations that gave us a sense of his accomplishments, especially in the world of magazine photography and art direction. Fischer is most closely...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader March 30, 2023 Bill Zehme, who chronicled the lives of show business personalities in the ’80s and ’90s, died last weekend after a ten-year battle with cancer. He was 64 and one of the most personable and likable people you’d ever want...
By Sara Davidson Sara Davidson’s blog November, 2021 “Who’s calling?” I told him my name, and said I wanted to tell her how much I liked her work… Then, realizing he was also a writer, I stammered, “I…I mean…I like your writing also…” “Just a minute,” he said. Joan...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic November 8, 2021 Jon Bradshaw always said he would die young, but he probably didn’t think he’d keel over on a public tennis court in Studio City a few weeks shy of turning forty-nine. The smart money had said he’d meet his fate on...
By John Schulian The Stacks Reader August 23, 2021 Darlin’ please write me, don’t waste precious time Or you’ll have an empty old mailbox like mine You wouldn’t be wrong if you called Tom T. Hall a country songwriter and stopped with that. He was, after all,...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic May 25, 2021 At the end of the last century there were plenty of “Best of the Century” lists and one that was most entertaining was Ron Rosenbaum’s 1999 column for The New York Observer in which he argued that Pale Fire by Vladimir...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader March 2, 2020 Picking up where we left off with The Essential Ron Rosenbaum: Part One, here’s another (baker’s) dozen from Rosenbaum—from lunches with power brokers in the 1980s, to literary appreciations of Shakespeare, Catch-22, and...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader November 2, 2020 Know this: The Village Voice website is now a curated trove of stories from their vast archives. Has been for a while, too. Praise is overdue. The site is terrific and for this we are grateful.
By David Hirshey Eight by Eight October, 2020 Greatness takes a physical toll on all those who achieve it. So it is a testament to Pelé’s courage and indomitable will that this month he will mark eight decades on the world stage after years of being battered by the...