Ten years ago, while rehabilitating from a traffic accident, Ann Marie Fleming came into possession of several reels of 16-millimeter film, home movies of her great-grandfather that revealed a curious bit of family history: her great-grandfather had been a famous magician who performed under the name Long Tack Sam. Inspired by this discovery, Fleming […]

Entangled Lives: Memoirs of 7 Top Erotica Writers offers a true-story peek into the very private lives of some very public sexual intellectuals. Marilyn Jaye Lewis edited Bill Brent (excerpt here), Rachel Kramer Bussel, Amie M. Evans, Ian Philips, Greg Wharton, and Rob Stephenson, as well as contributing her own steamy selection. Read on for […]

In her just-released memoir, Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside,
Bridget Kinsella, an editor at Publishers Weekly for 14 years, has written a story fueled in part by literary love. After meeting through a now-defunct writing program at California’s notorious Pelican Bay State Prison, Kinsella began a correspondence with, and eventually visited, Rory Mehan, […]

Kristen Buckley’s Tramps Like Us is like a rollercoaster ride through a New Jersey amusement park, except here, the funhouse mirrors manage to distort almost everything that happens to her zany family, turning what could be extremely sad, dark circumstances into ones that are worthy of reading aloud to anyone who’ll listen. Rather than mocking […]

Listen to an audio interview with John Sellers on:
• Why a 34-year-old guy is obsessed with music to the detriment of work, relationships, and health. [3:10]
[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/smithmag/Sellersobsessed.mp3]
• Influences, and the inevitable comparisons to High Fidelity. [2:39]
[audio:http://media.switchpod.com/users/smithmag/Sellersinfliuences.mp3]
• On Built to Spill and other bands that comprise the soundtrack of his life (and get somewhat short shrift […]

By Whitney Joiner
First-time memoirist James Salant grew up with a classic upper-middle-class family in Princeton, New Jersey: therapist mom, psychoanalyst father, and an older brother with a penchant for drugs and petty crime. At 15, following his brother Joe’s footsteps, Jim smokes his first joint. Then in an astonishingly quick turn of events, Jim transforms […]

If New York City has a memory, it will likely never forget its summer of 1945. It was the summer of VJ Day in Times Square, of Stork Club celebrity sightings and tabloids splashed with Judy Garland’s wedding to Vincente Minnelli and Marlene Dietrich touring tirelessly with the USO. It was the summer when the […]

Writer Rebecca Walker knew at the age of 20 that she wanted to have a baby. While traveling in Africa, she had a vision of herself mothering a child with a man she encountered there, but she pushed it aside. She continued to push her maternal longings aside for fifteen years until meeting her current […]

By Rachel Kramer Bussel
“Reading is Sexy” declares a sticker enclosed in Marissa Walsh’s Girl With Glasses kit, a promotional companion set to her quirky, pop culture-infused memoir Girl With Glasses: My Optic History (Simon Spotlight Entertainment). Other items include a zine full of four-eyed babes and a pair of plastic specs. For 34-year-old Walsh, wearing […]

Despite what the chubby owner of Vegas’ Moonlite Bunnyranch might tell those HBO cameras, violence is the world’s oldest profession. And if our war-mongering culture is any indication, business is booming. The real question is why? Why do we fight? What drives men to become warriors?
After studying environmental issues and oil painting at Harvard, Sam […]