The act of completion, for artists, provokes profound emotion. The painter Arshile Gorky once said that he never finished a piece but that "I just stop working on it for a while." Truman Capote, not ...

Imagine that F. Scott Fitzgerald, 20 years after the publication of "The Great Gatsby," had written a sequel told from Daisy Buchanan's point of view. In it, young Jay Gatsby, an Army lieutenant from ...

My favorite photo of my father shows him not long after his arrival in New York City from Puerto Rico, in the early 1950s. He sits, with a sly smile and slicked-back hair, at the Cuban Casino ...

When Oscar Hijuelos' landmark novel "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," about two musician brothers -- Cesar and Nestor Castillo who move from Cuba to New York -- came out in 1990, it amazed many ...

It is a rare alchemy - combining the written word, timing, and personal circumstances - but every reader has I believe, a few books that haunt them, often years after the reading, books that will ...

Pentimenti are the shadows of images covered over by later brushwork that sometimes emerge in old paintings. As all good Lillian Hellman fans know, the word derives from the Italian “pentirsi” — to ...