THAT PICTURE FRAME MODEL
★★★★★ (2 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing that picture frame model. …more
PONZANI BROS. APPLIANCE REPAIR
★★★★★ (1 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Ponzani Bros. Appliance Repair. …more
FAKING AN ILLNESS FOR SYMPATHY
★★★★★ (4 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing faking an illness for sympathy. …more
THE FOR SALE SIGN PLACED IN MY YARD
★★★★★ (5 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the ‘for sale’ sign placed in my yard. …more
The night my father lost his left eye to a rare disease, my parents and I were playing a game we called The Memory Game. The goal was to find among sixty-eight cards in all two that matched. …more
A HAT MY NEPHEW FOUND ON THE BUS
★★★★★ (1 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing a hat my nephew found on the bus. …more
Writing by hand does remind you, primally, of what this crazy thing we do is made of. The careful spilling of ink on paper, the joints and girders of letters. Paragraphs as immovable as cornerstones and the proud stab of a punctuation mark. The occupational hazards of a rip in the paper’s membrane or a smear on your shirt sleeve. Cluttered, imperfect business. Like life. …more
“I really had nothing left in my life when I came to trucking, just the clothes on my back.” …more
Incapable of making a good cup of tea, Barbara Gupta asks her colleague Meena Patel to teach her how to make Chai, not the pre-sweetened Starbucks kind that she loves so much, but the real thing, like the Chai that was served to her when buying overpriced textiles while vacationing in Coldcutta, I mean Calcutta, I mean Kolkata. …more
There’s Something Wrong with Sven combines imaginative leaps worthy of Calvino and Vonnegut with tragicomic irreverence of the George Saunders variety. …more
“Hey, kid, what’s the perfect murder weapon?”
George Covaleski used to ask me this question every time I went to see him. No matter how hard I tried, I could never come up with the right answer.
George knew a lot about murder weapons and the many ways people could get killed. …more
Last week, D.H. Lawrence wasn’t mentioned by name in any sports sections, and no professional athletes cited The Rainbow in their postgame interviews. But there were intriguing baseball- and football-related stories about the line between violence and love, anger and passion, manhood and mania—and what could be more Lawrentian than that? …more
“Why are you doing these interviews?” …more
I’m a congenital traveler, had been long before I wrote my first book. I took my first plane ride when I was two weeks old (taught me to travel light) and haven’t slowed since. Other than the frequency of travel (you want me to come to China and you’ll pay for it? Granada and Madrid, really?) what has changed since I’ve officially become a writer is that I’m now given social license to do what I’ve always done. I’m no longer stupid and slightly insane; I’m eccentric and dedicated to collecting stories, compulsive even. …more
As a society, there are specific fashion trends we all look back on and can pretty much agree were horrible mistakes. …more
My high school soccer coach was a Guatemalan immigrant who had made his way to the States when he was in his twenties. At first he’d earned his living as an Arthur Murray dance instructor, but that phase of his life, at least to those of us he coached, had faded into an unlikely myth. …more
I put myself in the group home. I was in the therapist office with my mom and I said, “I give up. I’m not going to try anymore,” meaning getting along with my mom, and he suggested the group home. To me it was a terrific idea. …more
Jenni – Patient Account Representative
I treat people the way I’m treated, with the same respect. I’m not worried about your feelings. …more
The e-ticket I held in my hand entitled me to board two airplanes, which I did. I flew all the way from Cairo International Airport to the glitzy city of Dubai with its innumerable skyscrapers jutting up out of the pastel-pink sands of that part of Arabia. …more
A group of Mexican teenagers encounters a bizarre America in Luis Alberto Urrea’s latest novel. …more
During an assembly-line interview process last week, I sat with writer and director Carlos Cuarón to talk about his new film, Rudo y Cursi. We met up at a self-described rock-and-roll hotel suite in downtown San Francisco. With his rat’s tail haircut and unwillingness to smile on demand, he reminded me of the kid I sat next to in eighth grade art class.
Carlos explained how Rudo y Cursi is a departure from his first writing credit, the foreign art-house classic, Y tu mamá también, although it is still a meditation on male bonding. After he got talking about the film, I asked Carlos to discuss his artistic influences. …more
Rising in front of us, surrounded by nothing but miles of empty sand, is the Bahrain Formula 1 racetrack. …more“How many people are willing to actually die for their art? I don’t know. I’m sure many are willing to take a risk and push themselves as far as they see fit, depending how dedicated and smart they are. Was Pat smart in the decision he made? Well, he did still have partial function of his kidney at the time, which minimized the dialysis some, although that could have changed at any point.” …more
If you live in San Francisco you’ve probably seen the signs on storefronts and taxis—the posters eye-catching and cryptic: War Music, flanked by a wing and a gun. …more
Hermione Lee’s marvelous biography of Virginia Woolf tells us that Woolf applied the same clear-eyed and unstinting analysis to her father, Leslie Stephen, that she did to most of her subjects, subjects that tended to be Victorian, domestic, and preoccupied with the mind. On her father, the upshot, for Woolf, was this: “Stephen’s crucial weakness, she thought, was that he allowed himself to behave like a genius (badly, that is), whereas he was, as he once told her, ‘only a good second class mind.’” …more
It is -7º F outside. In his kitchen, Harry makes me tea. He is a broad-shouldered man with a prominent chin and a deep, smooth voice. He has been remodeling this house for the better part of a decade, after expanding the house where his children grew up and his first wife still lives, less than a block away from here. …more
“One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.” …more
A lovely little film that’s more gallows than humor. …more
Click right corner of image for full screen. …more
“The site was becoming unmanageable as just a hobby… so I decided I either needed to quit the site or turn it into something I could live off of… The bigger challenge was how to balance taking the site seriously while simultaneously not worrying about it too much.” …more