Robert Stone’s writing has often been called “moral.” This loaded, pop-gun adjective is often levelled to no meaningful effect at novels also called “political,” as if to distinguish them from “small” novels, or novels about dogs on roller skates, but . . .
“Will I be rich / will I be poor / will I still sleep on the floor?” The Descendents, a California punk group, posed, prophesized, and lyricized my life’s looming questions when they sang, “What will I be like / . . .
My mother’s favourite book was the Chinese classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, also known as A Dream of Red Mansions. This was the only work of fiction . . .
Here is the first sentence of my autobiographical essay “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed,” which was originally published in the New York Times Book Review of August 22, 1982. I was forty. I wrote: “This is a memoir, but please . . .
In the prologue to her book of interviews with Argentine writers, Primera Persona, Graciela Speranza describes her visit with the then tremendously famous Manuel Puig at his house in the glamorous Leblon neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. It was . . .
From the ages of one to eleven, I lived in the Polish coastal city of Gdańsk. I was obsessed with two things: the sea and my mother, and I couldn’t imagine ever living without either one. But soon my mother . . .
“It’s a silly front,” she said. “But it’s very beautiful. Are they going to have an offensive?”“Yes.”“Then we’ll have to go work. There’s no work now.”“Have you done nursing long?”“Since the end of ’fifteen. I started . . .
In 1949, British librarian and collector Edgar Osborne donated close to two thousand rare and notable children’s books to the Toronto Public Library. The Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books has since grown to include over eighty thousand items, and . . .