July/August 2001
In This Issue
Roy Blount Jr., “Mark Twain's Reconstruction”; Peter Godman, “Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier”; Alex Beam, “The Mad Poets Society”; B. R. Myers, “A Reader's Manifesto”; fiction by George Singleton; Brooke Allen on chain bookstores; and much more.
Articles
Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores
Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-A-Million have enormously enriched the nation's cultural life
A Harrowing Mirror of Loneliness
Richard Yates was the supreme chronicler of American solitude
The Mad Poets Society
McLean Hospital, in Massachusetts, was for years America's most literary mental institution, a place that Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton knew well
Mark Twain's "Skeleton Novelette"
An introduction to Mark Twain's "A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage"—a work written for these pages 125 years ago and published here for the first time
Liquid Refreshment
Ponds and other water features can be lovely—but they can be stinking, murky eyesores. A primer on what makes the difference
The Colonel and the Bomb
Can a forty-year-old lost Cold War relic be brought to life?
Wharton's Sharp Eye
Our author, one of Britain's great novelists and literary biographers, explores Edith Wharton's short stories
The Tabloid Habit
Relentless celebrity coverage is a phenomenon as old as the movies
The Counterterrorist Myth
A former CIA operative explains why the terrorist Usama bin Ladin has little to fear from American intelligence
Graham Greene's Vatican Dossier
Documents from the archives of the Holy See reveal the deliberations among papal censors over how to deal with The Power and the Glory—and wise counsel from an unexpected source
Real Places
A wastewater-treatment facility, a fish-processing plant, and other prime tourist attractions in and around Boston
77 North Washington Street
Love, Singaporean Style
Faced with a graying population, a notoriously staid government has sanctioned an "All-Out Make-Out" campaign
Customized Quarantine
Child-free zones and other innovations in exclusionary living
A Reader's Manifesto
An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose
New and Noteworthy
The summer game, sharp short fiction, are you U?, Hitchens on Ferdinand Mount
Fouled Out
The story of a professor forced, because of his views on Bobby Knight, to act like a marked man
In Glass's House
More a classicist than an avant-gardist, Philip Glass embraces rock music without imitating it
Show-and-Tell
A short story
A French Fourth
The challenge of raising expatriated children
Field of Tin
A rediscovered baseball toy gets a retired player back in the game
Letters to the Editors
Mark Twain's Reconstruction
"A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage" and its moment in history
Sausages, Souse, and Shandybookers
A visit with a woman whose life is butchering
Word Fugitives
