Is it true that everyone remembers the day death was first explained to them? I was seven and a hamster had died. The hamster had been given to me, perhaps, so that it could die and facilitate the conversation I then had with my mother. I remember not wanting to pay too close attention to what my mother was defining for me, so I listened instead to the faint sound I heard coming from downstairs. It was my father playing a record. I strained to make out the lyrics of the song and realized that, by doing so, I could somewhat ignore the words my mother spoke. This was the first moment of what

South and west of central Chicago, there is no 22nd Street. Rather, between 21st and 23rd, the signs read Cermak Road. This thoroughfare follows the Red Line down from the big-money Loop to the threadbare African-American South Side. Roughly halfway between those two poles it crosses Pilsen. The neighborhood’s name derives from the Czech—the people of Chicago author Stuart Dybek—and it has always been an immigrant enclave. In the twenty-first century, the neighborhood is also home to a large community of Hispanics. Thus, the moving, energetic Painted Cities—the debut story collection of a

Ellen Willis, whose music writing recently received a much-deserved revival, was often drawn to the counterculture, progressive politics, and how the two overlapped. In this essay, originally published in 1989 in the Village Voice and reprinted in the new book The Essential Ellen Willis, she dwells on feminism, the concept of excess (sex and drugs), abstinence, gay rights, parenthood, and AIDS. Willis often finds her stride in complexity, and here she intricately examines and interrogates the notions of freedom she holds dear. Do all liberation movements set you free? Do conservative ways of

In 1962 Diane Arbus asked John Szarkowski, head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for August Sander’s address, “because there is something I would like to write to him about.” Several things make this request remarkable. First, there’s the shock that Sander (1876–1964) and Arbus (1923–1971) were even alive at the same time. Then there’s the ordinariness of the proposal, as if an up-and-coming songwriter were casually asking for Bob Dylan’s e-mail. Finally, there is the appropriateness of Arbus’s presumption. Sander’s photographs played a crucial part in the development of

As celebrity criminals go, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter isn’t a household name. But one of his aliases—Clark Rockefeller—has fueled outsize fascination ever since his tenure as a phony scion of the well-heeled clan ran out six years ago, when he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter. Books both gritty (Mark Seal’s The Man in the Rockefeller Suit) and literary (Amity Gaige’s novel Schroder) trailed along in the publishing-world wake, as did TV and big-screen flicksand a new kind of spectral figure of the popular imagination, “the fake Rockefeller.” So beguiling and audacious was the German-born