Byline: Zack Newick

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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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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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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Spectacular Deaths

Obituary for a year.

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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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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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The Last Accident of a Life

There was a bit of marinara sauce spilled out on the counter in a cluster of islands. Four blotches of red, decreasing in size and arcing away from the stovetop like Hawaii. The sauce was cold and was slowly drying … 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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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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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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