Category: Non-Fiction

A city is a perpetual creation…everything in it is “poetry” in the strictest sense of the term. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire It has been nearly three years since a hectic, enchanting three-day stay in Venice and the fascination...

My mother was weird. So much so that when referring to her with my sister, I always say: “Your mother… .” My sister does the same. She was a piano prodigy, who was invited to a Master Class with Percy Granger. She was also an...

To walk on soil is to walk on the dead. As February draws to a damp close, I take a wooden stake and a metal rasp from my father’s carpentry collection in the garage and head out into the valley. Our house, perched on the crest...

It was shortly before Christmas in 1982. I was about halfway through my chief residency year in urologic surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It was customary that faculty members would give holiday gifts to the...

Bi(Cycles) by Burcu Seyben When I was a kid, my parents rented a small apartment. Other low-income families, like us, were there, too. Vacations by the sea; I think we stayed for a month or so. I don’t really remember if I liked...

She lived a typical childhood. Her mother modeled for magazines, on runways, and in stores. Her other mother packaged Tastykakes and Swell Bubble Gum at their factories in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father sold Cadillacs at...

For my birthday some years ago, a dear girlfriend organized a ladies luncheon for me. It was touching, especially since I had not had a luncheon in my honor for more than twenty years. I had given her the name of ten of the most...

It was just before dessert on Christmas eve, sitting with a few neighbor guests in our living room and our friend, Sophie, who suddenly spoke up. We had just finished our crab cake supper and Sophie, as she stirred her coffee...

I wait in the small, light blue examination room, nervously tapping my index finger on the chair’s black vinyl armrest. Colorful posters displaying different parts of the brain decorate the walls. My favorite is a caricature of...