Mark Singer, a staff writer at The New Yorker from the age of 23 who extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 75. The cause of death, in a hospital, was cancer of the salivary gland, his son…
Jane Yolen, a children’s author who wrote some 450 books in practically every conceivable genre, including history, how-to, science fiction and poetry, and whose immensely popular children’s books, rich in folklore and fantasy, earned her the nickname “America’s Hans Christian Andersen,” died on Thursday at her home in Hatfield, a town in western Massachusetts. She…
Gordon S. Wood, a historian whose decades of research and writing established him as one of the country’s pre-eminent scholars of the American Revolution, the personalities of the founding fathers and the early years of the new republic, died on Sunday in Providence, R.I. He was 92. His daughter, Amy Wood, said he died at…
In a never publicly released story by Edith Wharton, a dinner party goes on in a French chateau during the summer of 1918 as World War I nears its end and while the booms of guns can be heard in the distance. “The Men Who Saved the World,” a previously unreleased fictional short story by…
David Henderson, a poet who rose to prominence with the pathbreaking Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and went on to write a best-selling biography of Jimi Hendrix that changed the way many interpreted Hendrix’s life, music and untimely end, died on May 14 in Lincoln Park, N.J. He was 83. His death, at a…
Siri Hustvedt was halfway through a new novel, about a writer tasked with completing his father’s unfinished manuscript, when her husband, the novelist Paul Auster, died from lung cancer. Continuing that story in his absence felt impossible. They were together for 43 years, the length of her career. She’d never published a book without his…
These tragic actress associations were apt: After Pat’s husband, Sam Daniels, an appellate lawyer, left her for his secretary, she had psychotic depressive episodes that included, on one occasion, feeding the possessions of their three children, whom she called “schnickelfritzes,” into a living-room fire. Sam was obviously not the picture of mental health either. Yes,…
SMALL TOWN GIRLS: A Writer’s Memoir, By Jayne Anne Phillips Most fiction writers have given so much of their own experiences to their characters that, after long careers, they are rarely inspired to become late-life autobiographers. Over the years, however, many are likely to have published a variety of nonfiction pieces — personal essays, talks,…
In an email interview, she confessed the Marilynne Robinson-sized hole in her reading, and the book her high school boyfriend would be glad she got to. SCOTT HELLER What’s the last great book you read? I finally read “Bel Canto” and I just — ugh! — luxuriated in it. What a pleasure. What books are…
About 150 people gathered in Manhattan on a recent evening for the debut of Steak Zine, a special issue of the food-focused literary journal Cake Zine. The cover, designed to resemble a perfectly marbled cut of beef, was red meat for the people in the crowd, who had paid $20 apiece to pack into Funny…
