The forbidden. The hidden. The unspoken and unspeakable. Life behind the façade, beneath the fancy dress, calls out to Gay Talese, the grandson of an immigrant Italian stonemason, the son of an immigrant Italian tailor. Hidden life lured him to break the Mafias code of silence in the 1960s, open the bedroom door in the 1980s and, across 60 years of such invasive, unsettling work, enlarge the boundaries of creative nonfiction—and our understanding of the world, as well—only to find himself too often persona non grata for his pains.Talese,

The telephone rang, it was my brother in Boston. He had survived the operation. Only 35 years old and he’d already had his mitral valve repaired.

After a series of visits to the grave of her parents, a writer reflects on the importance of finding a special place to commune with the dead

When I was a boy in Birmingham in the 1950s, Vulcan was, in ways, the city to me.

There’s something in your room that reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci,” I told my younger boy. “Something you have in common with him.” At least that was my understanding— flawed as it turned out, or so I’m now convinced, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.The

The future that I imagine for writers is one in which a cultural shift has occurred of paradigm-shattering proportions. A change akin to the end of legalized racial segregation and discrimination against women, both revolutions that I have witnessed in my lifetime. The future 1 imagine will save, salvage and reshape not only writers, and the work we do, but our culture and society, as well.

In the zany “contract” scene between Groucho and Chico Marx in “A Night at the Opera,” Groucho produces a pair of contracts that flow to the floor. He reads some supposed legalese— “party of the second part,” etc.—and

My 5-year-old daughter recently asked me about the habits of leopard seals. We went to Google and immediately had thousands of results to our search criteria. From the documents we looked at, it seemed that about a tenth of them had the basic information we wanted.

Here’s a scenario: It’s 2025, and you want a book—you being a senior who still fondly remembers books and a book being a non-voice-activated, tangible, artfully designed, paper-and ink-scented collection of human-generated original prose.

Outside my office door stands a gadget-of-all-trades. At the proverbial touch of a finger, it copies, produces pristine color prints, faxes, scans and converts documents into graphic files, and sends e-mails.