The furious saga of Teddy Ballgame

On a hot summer afternoon, the most glamorous birth father in America sits in a diner booth and tries to make sense of the world

The Knights of Columbus existed for one boy, who became one young man, as a never-quite-accessible playland where what could not be was always superior to what was. Things could not be for the boy because at the outset he was too small to lift the bowling balls or catch the medicine ball, too short to reach the functional level of the pool table, too young to smoke the cigars that the card players (playing pinochle, incomprehensible game) were smoking.

At 34, the first honest-to-God movie star of his generation becomes something else entirely in the brutal and beautiful new wrestling movie "Foxcatcher." But it didn't just happen overnight.

Who is Martin Amis, and why is everybody saying such terrible things about him?

Terry McMillan presents a vivid history of one woman's loves that is totally unvarnished, in a voice of comic lyricism seemingly discovered in the writing

It was the kind of summer that happens in a dream

Could the inspiring tale of a blind basketball player give a man’s lover the faith to return to him?

Some early conclusions on the future of mankind, which lies in the preadolescent minds of Colin Duffy and his contemporaries, who will be twenty-one in the year 2003. Hopefully, the women of the twenty-first century will be ready for them.

Bennington College, Vermont. Fall of 1982. A new freshman class. Among its heirs and heiresses, artists and rebels, druggies and poseurs: the future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem. What happened over the next four years—and beyond—would spark not just gossip and myth (and possible Ph.D. theses) but also some of the authors’ greatest novels. Return to a hothouse campus like no other . . .

The proof is in the Indian pudding and other recipes

A lifetime with The Real Thing

When it comes to fried chicken, let’s not beat around the bush for one second. To know about fried chicken you have to have been weaned and reared on it in the South. Period. The French know absolutely nothing about it, and Julia Child and James Beard very little.

I grew up barely middle class. Before the divorce, my dad was a depressive salesman, and my mom was a homemaker; afterward, my father lived three thousand miles away, my mother was a receptionist, and we moved in with her parents—a retired railroad laborer and a bakery clerk.

A real frozen TV dinner comes with green peas in the upper-right-hand corner. Everybody knows that