In 1955, Jack Finney published his best-selling novel “The Body Snatchers,” a story that so captured the American imagination that it was made into a movie not once, but three times, having a much more lasting impact on popular culture than Finney’s more critically acclaimed novels. “The Body Snatchers” tells the story of a small California town invaded by a perfidious alien species: huge pods that are able to take on the exact appearance, mannerisms and speech patterns of any given person.

Laura March* doesn’t seem particularly glad to see us. When I speak, her lashless eyelids flutter open then shut again. Her eyes follow my voice, find my face and then my partner’s face, try to focus.

Three decades before your birth, and long before 19 men crashed four hijacked U.S. planes to protest American policy in countries that most Americans could not locate on a map, I was raised in the clean unease of the Cold War.West

Craziness runs in my family like a current under waters that swell and recede with the seasons. My sister and I have stood at its shore and watched some of the adults in our life get close enough to the edge to be swallowed whole.

The phases of the moon are seven—not counting the “new moon,” which, for the most part, we don’t see—and all are gifts of sunlight.

Houdini leans to rise from the sofa on which he has been reclining and, in rising, receives a succession of punches to the lower abdomen. Although the magician endured a similar blow before a small crowd days before, it is backstage in the dressing room at the Princess Theatre that the story of his death often begins.

High in the north central mountains of Idaho, up the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River, and farther on, where Jordan Creek is born, stands Mount Estes.

First, three beginnings. Who is to say which is the source of all that followed?When he was a boy his father brought him a chunk of goldembedded in quartz. From British Columbia it was.

Most nonfiction writers I know can’t really get going on an essay, a chapter or even a book until they have set the direction and tone of the narrative at the outset.