Byline: Zack Newick

Stieglitz

He’s old, Stieglitz is, when I’m looking at this photograph in my dining room. It’s one hundred and forty-three years since he was born, but he’s still hunched over his desk in his little, crowded gallery like he was when … Read More

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Four Paragraphs

Sections excavated from short stories going nowhere.

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Sendak Send-Off

An appreciation in parting.

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Sarah Palin’s Alaska

Sarah Palin is the politician Jonathan Swift would have imagined for this century if he were living in it. An attractive woman with some sort of strictly defined set of morals, she has exploded onto the scene because she is … Read More

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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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America from Afar

Roman Polanski has lived one of the most fascinating lives of the last century, though it would be hard to call it “good.” Such a title ought to be reserved for more pleasant, straightforward existences that perhaps begin modestly and … 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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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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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 Making of Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson has always been a divisive filmmaker. There are those who revere him and those who think all his films are simultaneously overwrought and underdeveloped. But whatever you may think of him, it is hard to deny that he … Read More

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L.A. Sublime

One of my favorite pieces of writing that I’ve ever read is “Pafko at the Wall,” a novella by Don DeLillo that also serves as the opening to his massive novel _Underworld_. The story is about “The Shot Heard ‘round … Read More

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