If a pair of writer/directors exists that can rival Joel and Ethan Coen for a body of work with profound depictions of humanity, it is another set of brothers. The films of the Dardennes, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have consistently been among the best of modern offerings and were a main feature in an essay I…

For my son, Alex In the final months before our hamster died, I would lie in bed late at night, wondering if he was still alive. In the quiet of the house, after my husband had left for work at 3:00 a.m. and my children were asleep in their beds, I would strain my ears…

For my daughter, Evangeline Sofia, who celebrated her first birthday on the second day of October. “Can you build me a tent in the living room when you get home, Chad?” My wife Becki made this request via Google chat. “A tent?” I replied, laughing. “In the living room? What?” When we were children, my…

The few years I lived in Houston’s Menil neighborhood, right behind the University of St. Thomas, I felt like I’d been invited to live in a sacred garden, a nearly prelapsarian environment. It is a beautiful space, near the art museum known as the Menil Collection and its park, and bordered by several streets of…

“Isaac’s being a jerk,” my seven year-old, Isaiah, says about his older brother. They have been sledding over new-fallen snow. “Why do you say that?” “Because he keeps knocking me off my sled.” “Why do you think he does that?” I ask. I’ve been trying to help my children consider how sometimes they incite one another. “Because…

I get tingly with anticipation when I’m about to meet a new poet. I don’t mean the poet in person; I mean meeting the poems of someone whose work had been unknown to me. And so it was when I opened the new selection of poems by Dunstan Thompson, Here at Last is Love, just…

My Uncle Jimmy died in September at the age of ninety. Born in Sicily, he immigrated to New York when young and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was the husband of my aunt for sixty-one years, the frolicsome father of my two cousins, a regular part of my life until…

The Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell died October 5, 2015. He was sixty-seven years old. Mankell was diagnosed with cancer a year ago during a trip to the orthopedic surgeon. Mankell thought he had a slipped disk. Turned out he had tumors in his neck and lung. The cancer had spread. Henning Mankell wrote plays,…

The other day I got an email from a high-school boyfriend, which drove me headlong into remembrance of a time in my life I’ve tried to forget. My husband is the only person I know who enjoyed high school, so I don’t harbor any delusions that my unhappiness made me unique among teenagers. In fact,…

Continued from yesterday. Catholic imagery appears throughout Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, the posthumous selected stories that has brought her singular fiction out of obscurity. The magnificent “El Tim,” a story about a charismatic adolescent Mexican-American boy who disrupts a Catholic school with his sly behavior, begins: “A nun stood in each classroom…