We tell ourselves stories in order to live. —Joan Didion, The White Album I was fond of Christmas as a kid, what with all the presents and candy and general atmosphere. It was a time of year when it was okay to eat too much, watch too much television, stay in one’s pajamas until dinner. …
…You ever get that instinct to call your friend anyway, warn her that you’re here on her stoop at 5:50 AM, but you never do it? Because you want to be those three knocks on her door in the first bruised hours of morning, that fizz of panic in her brain, is it the police …
Finding a Christmas picture took some digging. My family has never done greeting cards or family photos. We don’t have any special holiday traditions, except the standard presents underneath a tree on Christmas morning. However, thinking about it, I can’t actually remember the last time my mom, dad, sister, and I gathered around the …
[This is the first of a series of holiday story-pictures, or storyographies, from our editors and staff.] Christmas Eve. 2013. My daughters, Emma and Sophia, track Santa on Google Maps. “Daddy, he’s flying over China.” And he is—an animated sleigh, the reindeer, bouncing across the screen. “He’ll be here soon, Daddy.” There’s a calm in this moment, …
It’s God’s day, but I wear thigh highs beneath my Bible. Maybe that’s why He took my flock. My lambkin lost, I feel forsaken. I witness crooks and necks that crane toward this skirt impractical for tending sheep or even nailing up Have You Seen Me? posters… And so begins the chapter “Little Bo Peep Comes to …
The 2015 MLS Cup game is this Sunday, the final match-up of a long, grueling U.S. soccer season. To celebrate, an essay by Story co-founding editor Vito Grippi about the narratives soccer offered him as an American child of an Italian immigrant family. WHAT WE CALL SOCCER IS USUALLY CALLED FOOTBALL. That’s what the English call it. Though …
Today we are cheating a bit with a book technically published nine months ago, but it’s Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon’s memoir Girl in a Band, and the real publication date for any rock-n-roll memoir is the paperback one, because you can’t roll a hardcover and shove it in your back pocket. Dey Street Books releases the paperback edition of Girl …
On Thursday, September 17, 2015, I met novelist Justina Ireland at lunch with the Story staff and several York College of Pennsylvania students. She was visiting as part of the college’s cultural series of lectures and readings, and she had agreed to do an interview with me after lunch for the Story website. When we arrived at the …
Every Tuesday, Story Online will recommend a new book being published. To kick off New Day Tuesday, check out one of our favorite Story editors, Ryan Britt, and his new book, Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths. This collection of essays is personal, insightful, hysterical. Geek-royalty and Welcome to Night Vale narrator Cecil Baldwin calls the book “personally revealing, …
In the movie, when Dracula moves from Transylvania to London, the first thing he does is crash the opera, and starts making the moves on the ladies. In particular he’s interested in Miss Mina (Helen Chandler), though Mina’s friend Miss Lucy (Frances Dade) has the hots for Dracula just a little bit more. Soon after …