You’re not going to find anyone who likes Dorothy Parker as much as we do. This is one of our favorite Dorothy Parker interviews, credit given to the Paris Review, the Art of Fiction No. 13, from way back in 1956. The interview starts at the very beginning INTERVIEWER: Your first job was on Vogue, wasn’t…
First published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. It is easily his most famous story, if not one of the most famous stories of all time. Notice how long the paragraphs are. Back then, whole paragraphs went one page or more. Part I A man…
Bop Bop Against That Curtain by Charles Bukowski is from the fall 1975 issue of Arcade, The Comics Review #3, complete with Robert Crumb illustrations. We talked about women, peeked up their legs as they got out of cars, and we looked into windows at night hoping to see somebody fucking but we never saw…
Probably O’Henry’s most well-known story, The Gift of the Magi, originally published in the collection, The Four Million, published in 1906. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the…
I was saddened to find out a few years ago that they discontinued the old writer’s market guides by Writer’s Digest Books. In fact, it seems the whole Writer’s Digest Books division went the way of the Do Do bird. I had every edition since 1978. Then I got all excited. I heard it was…
Richard Cory by Edward Arlington Robinson Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said,…
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir I heard the wagons rumbling past the garden fence, sometimes I even saw them through gently swaying gaps in the foliage. How the wood of their spokes and shafts creaked in the summer heat! Laborers were coming from the fields and laughing so that it was a scandal. I…
The telephone rang at Warren Hinckle’s San Francisco home at about 3:30 in the morning on Wednesday, April 29, 1970. When Hinckle picked up the receiver, he heard the unmistakable voice of Hunter S. Thompson, calling from Aspen, proclaiming, “Goddammit, Scanlan’s has to cover the Derby. It’s important.” The pitch, even at the late hour and the…
YOU AND YOUR BEER AND HOW GREAT YOU ARE by Charles Bukowski Jack came through the door and found the pack of cigarettes on the mantle. Ann was on the couch reading a copy of Cosmopolitan. Jack lit up, sat down in a chair. It was ten minutes to midnight. “Charley told you not to smoke,”…
I was thinking the other day I don’t have near enough O. Henry. in fact, I don’t have any. Time to fix that. Why not start with one of his best stories, the Ransom of Red Chief. The story first appeared in the July 6, 1907 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It has been…
