You are currently viewing the stories for “July 2009.”
Sometimes I sit in the lunchroom of the Guggenheim Museum and write. If I can, I sit at the rear wall, where there are many framed black and white photographs of the museum’s benefactors, artists, and scenes of the museum’s construction. A bearded Brancusi sits with his dog; they resemble one another, both smiling. Thomas Messer, the museum’s first director, [...]
Some people say the 1958 NFL Championship game between New York and Baltimore was the greatest game ever played. Some say it was the playoff game where Carlton Fisk hit that home run. Some say it was the 1980 Olympics when the US Hockey Team beat the Russians. All those people are wrong because I didn’t play in any of [...]
The second time I met Michele she wore a similar get-up as the first. She showed up at my office to pick up her set of apartment keys wearing a pink and blue Indian floral tank dress layered over green army pants with the fly held together by safety pins and bright orange clogs. Her henna-ed brick red hair with [...]
Please join us for our upcoming readings: Wednesday, July 8th 12:30pm Bryant Park: Bryant Park Reading Room Thomas Beller will moderate a panel discussion on writing in New York, with Joseph O'Neill (Netherland), Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin), Jonathan Ames (The Double Life Is Twice as Good) and Alice Mattison (Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn). They will [...]
At the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Bond Street about a quarter of a block ahead of me, three young men waited at the crosswalk for the light to change. Two were dressed in thug-casual regalia: sneakers, baggy pants, baseball caps askew, and hoodies up to obscure clear lines of sight to their faces. The third wore only the cap [...]
Before the City got so strict about it, Brooklyn used to be flooded with fireworks every summer. On the Fourth of July the little blue pieces of paper from firecrackers built up in drifts on the street corners in Kensington where people spent the whole night setting them off. Not me, though. I was in front of our house with [...]
My best friend Rebecca's birthday present this year was two tickets to see the Mets at Shea Stadium. After a bag search and full-body metal-detector sweeping, we made it to our seats just in time to sit out the national anthem. I like to get to a ball game on time, if only for the pleasure of publicly showing my [...]
