In Papua, Indonesia, fifty miles south of the largest gold mine in the world, a little Muslim girl is staring at me. She’s been at it for two minutes and twenty seconds now; I know this because I’ve been timing her. There she is, not...
am a transplant and cancer surgeon and in my office, stashed among folders containing notes and old operative reports from my residency, two fellowships, and practice, is a 9 × 12 manila envelope that bulges with small white stickers. Each...
Severn’s biographer and chief apologist, William Sharp, concludes that “throughout life Severn was a strange mixture of childlike vanity, genuine humility, high aims and ambitious efforts, with accomplishment often far short.” He adds that...
A man’s letters have a different claim on privacy than his poems and therefore a different claim on truth. Letters lie in the uneasy realm between writing published (the words, if not anonymous, a writer must stand by) and writing meant for...
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The following interview was conducted in 1977 for publication in El Manifiesto—a now-defunct Colombian leftist journal. Chatting with the magazine’s staff writers, García Márquez opens up remarkably and bares his most...
I spent three years as a rock music critic in El Paso, Texas, which was where I lived at the tail end of the eighties and where I came of age, in a sense—grew old enough, that is, to recognize that heavy metal was, essentially, tribal in...
