On the surface, Kelly McMasters had a perfect American childhood: A kind family, supportive neighbors, sparklers on the Fourth of July, sledding expeditions in the woods, popsicles made in ice cube trays. But as she grew older, she started to notice that things in Shirley, a working class Long Island town, were not what she’d […]

“It seems impossible for me to be pregnant now. All of the years of drunken sex with strangers, forgotten birth-control pills, weekend trips blurred from substance abuse, my year of so-called nymphomania. My name is Rebecca and I’m a sex addict. But I wasn’t a sex addict. I was just lonely.”
Chapter 1. Holy Shit, I’m […]

Painted—played piano—read Baudelaire—and saw Manny. But I couldn’t resist thinking about that girl—! Invited that girl—Pearl is her name—to tea next Thursday afternoon—I hope I’m not disappointed—with her voice, I shouldn’t be.
According to plan, Florence and Pearl Siegelstein met, one late afternoon in March 1932, at an English tearoom on Lexington Avenue, advertised as “a […]

New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee started tracking down a suspiciously high number of lottery winners, and ended up following a trail that led through hundreds of Chinese restaurants on six different continents. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, the book that resulted from this epic journey, ended up being about a lot more than fortune […]

One of the highlights of our book tour was spending Valentine’s Day with hundreds of other awkward single people (and one couple that wouldn’t stop licking each other’s faces) at a live Mortified event in Los Angeles. It was everything we hope to someday achieve with a SMITH Slam—great writing, brilliant comedy, perfect projections and […]

Perfect From Now On, John Sellers’ breezy, smart indie-rock-is-my-life anthem-cum-memoir, is just out in paperback. Back when it first published as a hardcover, SMITH was pleased to run an excerpt from this debut memoir, as well as an audio interview with the author. Like music? Memoirs? Guided By Voices? Some or all of […]

“I haven’t strangled my son, raised my voice, or even just slapped him around a little. I imagine I would be a shoo-in for Father of the Year.”
Trey Ellis has spent the past 15 years exploring nearly every form of prose imaginable to a writer. In 1989, just out of Stanford University, he wrote The […]

In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Avram who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: I love you and I need five hundred dollars. His body was covered in hair as thick as wool, but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left the house without Afrin nasal […]

Chapter One
1953: Amherst, Massachusetts
Read an in-depth interview with Leslie Garis here. Buy the book here.
In those years I spent a lot of time in the dumbwaiter, moving up and down behind the walls, listening to voices. I sat with my knees up: sometimes I clasped my arms around my legs, sometimes I kept my hands […]

“He shot out of the womb angry. And then he left that same way. “

How do you tell the tale of Hunter S. Thompson? Arguably, no one has told the story of the Louisville, Kentucky-born rebel who went on to change journalism (and inspire hordes of awful imitators) better than the man himself, via his […]