The Second Act

  I have never been much of a fan of horror fiction. So much of it always seemed overdone with graphic images and plot devices and I always suspected the writer was primarily looking for a movie deal and thinking first of what the special effects technicians could conjure up. But ghost stories are different … Read more

Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” which was inspired by the author’s experiences in the infantry during the Vietnam War, has become a classic work of modern American fiction since it first appeared in Esquire magazine in 1986. O’Brien wrote several other short stories about his Vietnam experiences and collected them in book … Read more

Shortly after I graduated from law school and began working as an attorney in San Francisco, I experienced something that might be described as a kind of cultural epiphany. I realized that I had spent so much of my youth engrossed in the literature, history and culture of western Europe that I had little knowledge … Read more

When I was growing up in San Mateo in the 1960s I was blessed to live within easy walking distance of the city’s public library. On weekends and during summer vacations I probably spent more time there than anywhere else. My middle school and high school years were a period in which I explored my … Read more

In Dave Eggers’s latest novel Heroes of the Frontier Josie is a sort-of retired dentist from Ohio and single mother of two whose life has been turned upside down and inside out through a sequence of upheavals both heartbreaking and hysterical. Her dental practice has been all but destroyed through a lawsuit in which an elderly … Read more