By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 13, 2020 O’Connell Driscoll is a great name for a writer, the kind of byline that sticks. Trouble is bylines are easily forgotten and the history of magazine writing is littered with terrific writers who are neglected and Driscoll...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 11, 2020 Last summer, I spent a few hours with the illustrator Robert Giusti at his beautiful home. Just a terrific, unpretentious guy—and great company—Giusti did a lot of magazine work in the ’70s and ’80s, but his most famous...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader March 22, 2020 In the early nineties, I went to the Museum of Broadcasting (now the Paley Center For Media) with my friend Mary Lou to watch Dennis Potter’s final TV interview with Melyn Bragg. Potter was dying and during the interview...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader December 17, 2019 Last year, Harlem, 1958, a beautiful book celebrating the 60th anniversary of the most famous picture in jazz history was published. It remains a perfect gift for the jazz lover or the pop culture history buff in your...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader July 2, 2019 Julian Allen is one of our favorite magazine illustrators. He made a splash in England in the late ’60s and then arrived in New York during the Watergate era. For the next twenty plus years his work was a fixture in the...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader A couple of our pals have new stellar new book anthologies out and both are well worth your time. From the intrepid Wright Thompson, ESPN’s maestro of longform, comes his first anthology, The Cost Of These Dreams: Sports Stories and...
By Alex Belth Esquire November 2016 Edward Sorel is one of the finest—and funniest—caricaturists this country has ever produced. Although he works in a variety of styles, you’ll likely recognize his work right away—you’ve seen it in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker,...
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic June 2016 The Classic Q&A: Ron Rosenbaum Though he needs no introduction, we’ll give is a shot: Ron Rosenbaum is the author of seven books, including three anthologies of his magazine work (most recently The Secret Parts of Fortune)....
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic 2016 Back in 1998, magazine writer Mike Sager was best known for his fearless profiles of drug dealers, crackheads, porn stars, and neo-Nazis. But that year Esquire handed him a very different kind of assignment: Write about an old man....
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...
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...
