Fifth and sixth graders. They burst through the door full of questions. “Does the sun make noise?” “Does Saturn wear bracelets?” “Do clones have belly buttons?” As I watch the kids’ faces, I wonder who among them will grow up flummoxed by the world. Over there: the boy with the blue backpack, bum...
Harry’s father would tell him to order anything he wanted from the menu: steak and Irish potatoes, chicken and dumplings, hot apple pie. He’d claim, as he always did on these trips, he was proud of his son, and maybe as a treat back in the room he’d offer Harry a sip of warm choc beer. The bottle...
Where Is World War II? IF IT HAD BEEN ACAPULCO, Joe would have beaten the film crew there. But the location scouts had staked out a patch of desert twenty miles northwest of Guaymas, in the Mexican state of Sonora. According to Catch-22’s screenwriter Buck Henry, the area offered a “breathtaking ...
Her room is across the hall from a bathroom and there is one old man – like her, a resident of the place – who forgets to shut the door when he goes to use the john. My grandmother shouts at him and he looks up, startled; the nurses come to clean his urine off the floor. In a rage he steps into m...
Bern wasn’t sure what this combination said about his West Side neighborhood. One day, he popped into the shop for an extension cord. He meandered up the aisles past Spanish combs and plastic flowers, old water pumps, shower nozzles, hat stands, paintings of bullfights on velvet, and bins of used...
wrote Caitlin Flanagan, referring to what she called “Didion-mania.” Flanagan was fourteen in 1975. Her father, chair of the Berkeley English Department, was hosting Didion as a Regents’ Lecturer, a position established with the aid of Didion’s old teachers Mark Schorer and James Hart to bring to...