Byline: Zack Newick

The Book Has a Body

Jonathan Safran Foer has had a trajectory in the publishing world that is close to ideal. In 2002, at the age of 25, he published _Everything is Illuminated_, a novel that developed out of his senior thesis at Princeton where … Read More

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Love or Nothing

Shakespeare asks the big questions and sometimes he answers them. In Romeo and Juliet he asks about love, often.

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Libraries

In my house there is a library. It used to be called the playroom, back when I was very small and very young and learned what _Don Quixote_ was by watching the _Wishbone_ episode. It was a library then, too, … Read More

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Stories That We Believed

My father stands roasting in his black neoprene wetsuit, a surfboard jammed under each arm so that he looks like he might just take off at any moment. In his face I find memories, sewn in amongst the creases and … Read More

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Reading Salinger on the Train

The link above the rest of the page was fresh and in red. It was urgent, it seemed. “J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of _The Catcher in the Rye_, dies at 91.” A few weeks ago, coming back from winter break, … Read More

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The Cape

Recently I went to a reading by the Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart at Labyrinth. He was reading from his new novel Super Sad True Love Story, a widely praised satirical novel about the very near future. Shteyngart is a young … Read More

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Spectacular Deaths

2011 in deaths.

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This Is… Princeton

In writing about the pillow fight that took place on Friday, April 17 in front of the Frist Campus Center, I feel it is my duty to report as accurately as possible the events that transpired up to and during those ten idyllic minutes of being bathed in feathers. The following report is as honest and strictly detailed as my mind would allow.

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Accidents of the Present Time

The grass is trimmed like my father obsesses over. It’s green as Heineken bottles, as my mother’s eyes when shining with tears, and the white lines that frame it up and down stand out like Claire’s porcelain skin at Ricky’s son’s baptism.

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Four Paragraphs

Sections excavated from short stories going nowhere.

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Nobel Nonsense

There are few greater honors for the writer than to meet the King of Sweden. This, of course, comes after one wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, joining the ranks of Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Bellow and Neruda. The King of … Read More

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The New Jersey Dream

In Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel _American Pastoral_, his protagonist, a Jew named Seymour Levov who goes by the nickname “the Swede,” sees his life turned upside down when his daughter turns terrorist and blows up a post office. … Read More

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