British author J.G. Ballard, a highly distinctive and often controversial writer, has passed away. Here are some of his most memorable novels and short stories.

Empire of the Sun

Crash

The Atrocity Exhibition

The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard

In the late 17th century, famed pirate Emer Morrisey was on the cusp of escaping pirate life with her one true love and unfathomable riches when she was slain and cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, dooming her to one hundred lives as a dog before returning to a human body — with her memories intact. Now she's a contemporary American teenager, and all she needs is a shovel and a ride to Jamaica.  Continue reading...

On a foggy February morning in 1983, fourteen people were gunned down at the Wah Mee club in Maynard Alley, just shy of South King Street in Seattle's Chinatown. It was the worst mass-murder in Washington State history.  Continue reading...

Horton Foote, an esteemed dramatist, screenwriter, and memoirist, has passed away at the age of 92. Here is some of his best collected work.

Three Plays

Three Screenplays

Beginnings: A Memoir

Farewell

Acclaimed writer Zadie Smith has a fascinating article in the New York Review of Books on "many-voiced" people, including Eliza Doolittle, Barack Obama, Shakespeare, and herself. Read it here.

I've given birth to two children by scheduled Cesarean section, so I never had to spend a moment in actual labor. Is it true that many women forget the painful hours they spent in natural childbirth? I read somewhere that nature created some mechanism in us by which women do, indeed, forget so that we'll be willing to have more than one child. If it's true, I think I could compare the writing of Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts to a kind of natural childbirth. Sometimes I look at that tidy book with its dark, evocative cover and wonder just how in the heck it got here.  Continue reading...