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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Spectacular Deaths

2011 in deaths.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Where the Wild Things Still Are

I haven’t been young in a very long time, at least in the sort of way Max is in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. That book, which sits on my bookshelf at home with a tattered cover and … Read More

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