Conversations

An interview with Marjan Kamali, author of the forthcoming novel The Stationery Shop.

Over the long Veterans Day weekend, I’m hitting the final lap on the world’s most procrastinated thesis. I’m focusing on Virginia Woolf—specifically, on how...

Nobody has ever catcalled me.  God knows I’ve tried: short shorts, no top, the whole caboodle.  But however much I’m “asking for it,” it...

ZEITGEIST On a sunny day in an outdoor cafe in mid-August, I found myself thoroughly absorbed in Oliver Sacks's memoir, On the Move: A Life,...

A child's excitement and ingenuity create a fiery disaster

When I interviewed Allen Ginsberg I said something right off that startled him, though what I said was simple and not raunchy in the least, as if raunchy would ever affront a poet who liked saying, "Why don't we get right down to the cunt of the matter?"

David Sedaris and I were riding down Commonwealth Avenue in the backseat of his media escort’s Chevy Impala. I was trying to take notes without getting carsick, and he was pointing out local businesses, wondering aloud if their owners were important enough to rate a Wikipedia entry.