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Articles by Will Blythe
The Life, Death-And Afterlife-of Literary Fiction
The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary FictionSarah Kim "Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Those of you who are reading this essay, let me ask you, right away—is your smart phone next to you? Or is it in your hand? Are you reading this on your phone, swiping up the paragraphs, swipe, swipe, swipe, wondering how far you're going to have to swipe to actually finish this thing?
Book Review: ‘Human Playground: Why We Play,’ by Hannelore Vandenbussche
Book Review|These Photos Prove That Every Culture Has a Culture of Play https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/books/review/human-playground-hannelore-vandenbussche.html Nonfiction A Belgian photographer’s coffee table book captures athletes from around the world in a variety of sports. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
Why the Duke vs. North Carolina Rivalry Makes Hatred Easy to Love
Arts & Culture The South’s most heated college basketball matchup heads to the Final Four this weekend for a historic bout By Will Blythe March 31, 2022 My late father was never the biggest basketball fan. He often spent as much time watching my mother and me watching games on television as he spent watching the games themselves. She and I yelled and cried and whined and leapt and swaggered, raising our fists over our heads in victory, slumping down on the couch in defeat.
Innocents Lost (Published 2007)
June 3, 2007 Who is this Nathan Englander, at 37 so young in novelist years, but already possessed of an old master’s voice? Well, it’s not his voice exactly; one senses that Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer are living under the name Nathan Englander in a witness protection program for Jewish fabulists. But the man’s apparent lack of vanity is impressive.
Q&a:kris Kristofferson
We strive to present a reader-friendly digital text version of each story. While errors in automatic conversion are inevitable, we are devoted to editing every article to make it error-free. We haven’t gotten to this one yet but we’re on the case! "I was about to get fired for not letting 24 hours go between the throttle and the bottle. It looked like I'd trashed my act." Q&A:KRIS KRISTOFFERSON MAN AT HIS BEST Music THERE’S NO BETTER dinner companion than Kris Kristofferson.
White Supremacist William Pierce: Profile of 'Turner Diaries' Author
Up here on his West Virginia Mountain, Dr. William Pierce — novelist, provocateur, perhaps the world’s most influential white supremacist — likes to look out and imagine the end of America as we know it. First, the economy will sour. There will be riots in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit. Men and women will be dragged from their cars; there will be atrocities. Whites and blacks will savagely battle each other in the streets.
Uncle Joe and The Turkey Bowl – Our State Magazine
Uncle Joe came from Follansbee, West Virginia, a town in the thick of steel country. He became legendary from the day he arrived in our family via his marriage to Aunt Sal. Among his precocious accomplishments were acts of teenage delinquency that my siblings and I could only envy and dream of one day committing. For instance, he and his buddies once smuggled a Nash Metro into their high school and drove it up and down the halls, waving at their classmates and the principal.
A December Night
In 1967, when he was nineteen and suffering from his first bout of heroin addiction in New York, James Taylor and his father spoke on the telephone. “Wait right there,” Ike said. “Don’t move.” He drove the ten hours from Chapel Hill to New York in the family station wagon, loaded the car with James’s few possessions, and took his son, who slept nearly the whole way, back to the family home in the Morgan Creek neighborhood to recover. Which James did, for a while.
A December Night
In 1967, when he was nineteen and suffering from his first bout of heroin addiction in New York, James Taylor and his father spoke on the telephone. “Wait right there,” Ike said. “Don’t move.” He drove the ten hours from Chapel Hill to New York in the family station wagon, loaded the car with James’s few possessions, and took his son, who slept nearly the whole way, back to the family home in the Morgan Creek neighborhood to recover. Which James did, for a while.
A December Night
Article published in the Fall 2018 'North Carolina Music Issue' of Oxford American In 1967, when he was nineteen and suffering from his first bout of heroin addiction in New York, James Taylor and his father spoke on the telephone. "Wait right there," Ike said.
Cathedrals of Sport
I confess that my knee-jerk response upon opening Rafi Kohan’s “The Arena,” a panoramic reportorial romp through American sporting venues, was uncharitable. Who, I thought, wants to read about “the arena”? The games that take place inside arenas, sure. The players that play those games, of course. Lots of books get written about games and players. Classics, even.
Oklahoma City, the Ultimate ‘Boom Town,’ Rendered Vivid and Surreal
Nonfiction Image Oklahoma settlers race to claim land in the Cherokee Strip in 1893. Aug. 21, 2018 BOOM TOWN The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis By Sam Anderson Illustrated. 427 pp. Crown. $28.
A Lot Like Prayer: Remembering Denis Johnson
In September 1990, the wait to get into Liberia drove Denis so mad with boredom and frustration that he considered flying home. “West Africa is the land where God came to learn to wait,” he wrote later. He had boarded a Nigerian freighter in the neighboring country of Sierra Leone. The boat lingered 12 days past its scheduled departure before finally setting sail and crashing into the port at Monrovia. From the ship’s deck, Denis could hear gunfire crackling through the city.
In Joshua Ferris’s Stories, Couples Lead Lives of Quiet Desperation
Anxiety, along with its fraternal twins, self-consciousness and humiliation, are the default inner states of Ferris’s characters, who find their uneasy minds exacerbated by perilous new forms of modern communication. Cellphones, for instance, serve as inadvertent agents of chaos, as in “Fragments,” when a wife butt-dials her husband, who picks up and overhears a static-ridden dialogue between wife and lover.
Lone Star - NYTimes.com
Bad historical novels — which is to say, most historical novels — are bad in exactly the same way: stuffed with the usual rogues’ gallery of historically certified villains, they’re banal costume dramas, predestined in their epiphanies and as insufferable in their virtue as a teenage vegan. The past is mere stage set for a morality play with a foregone conclusion. The heroes may wear hoopskirts or codpieces, but they possess the latest in glittering modern consciences.
High Balls - Esquire Classic
GEORGE PLIMPTON AND I decided to visit Hunter after he sent me a photograph of himself sinking a 30-foot putt at the Aspen Golf Club. He signed it to me with Res Ipsa Loquitur across the image, and there was a message on the back: Come out and play golf with me sometime—bring George—and money; I will beat both of you like mules. Hunter’s Owl Farm had seen numerous visitations far more exalted than ours.
Full-Court Press in North Carolina
I had reasons to be dubious of John Feinstein’s “The Legends Club,” a chronicle of the scalding rivalry between the college basketball coaches Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano, whose desperate battles with one another in the 1980s and 1990s turned North Carolina’s Research Triangle into the athletic equivalent of a war zone.
'To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever'
I am a sick, sick man. Not only am I consumed by hatred, I am delighted by it. I have done some checking into the matter and have discovered that the world's great religions and wisdom traditions tend to frown upon this. Therefore, dear reader, I need your prayers. But even more than I do, the University of North Carolina's basketball team, the object of my obsession, needs them. Here is the depth of my sickness. It is several years back on a beautiful afternoon during basketball season.
Five Encounters with Vegetation
THE WOODS The August night tells me that I’m home once again, down from New York City, where I’ve lived since 1987, a long barreling Interstate drive away. In the garage, the Subaru’s cooling engine ticks and clatters. All around me as I stretch and unbend, the darkness of a Chapel Hill neighborhood resounds, a vast, pulsing rave of cicadas, crickets, and frogs, with the occasional hoot of an owl thrown in to terrify the small mammals.
Read Our Issues Online
In the second chapter of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, there’s a startling passage in which Biff Brannon, owner and proprietor of the New York Cafe, upbraids his wife Alice: “‘Listen,’ he said. ‘The trouble with you is that you don’t have any real kindness.
A Credible Saint: How Dean Smith Became North Carolina's Moral Compass
The following is excerpted from To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever, by Will Blythe. Soon after I returned to Chapel Hill , I had arranged to visit with Dean Smith, the former North Carolina head coach. I dressed up for the occasion, although these days the journalist in me had become so blasé about interviews that he tended to walk out of the house wearing whatever happened to be hanging on the nearest chair.
Backtalk - As a Legend Steps Down, A Big 'Amen' - NYTimes.com
I guess the world didn't end Thursday at 2 P.M., but it sure felt that way to me. That was the moment Dean Smith stepped down after 36 years as coach of the University of North Carolina basketball team. As a Tar Heel expatriate currently doing hard time in exile among the Manhattan literati, I'd dreaded that day for years, and when it finally arrived it felt awful, worse even than losing to Duke, though for the record I am compelled to note that that has happened only once in the last nine games.
Opinion | Fired? Speak No Evil
Op-Ed Contributor Jan. 2, 2014 I WAS fired the other day. I believe the preferred phrase is “terminated,” which is how my former employer, Byliner, a digital publishing company and subscription service in San Francisco, put it. I was informed that our “burn rate” was too high, that we needed to show investors that we were serious about reducing it, and that while my loss of a job was unfortunately going to be a part of that reduction, this had nothing to do with the quality of my work.
To Their Own Beat (Published 2010)
If you’re like me, you tend to regard plot summaries as a necessary boredom at best. They’re the flyover country between a reviewer’s landing strips of judgment, revealing almost nothing about the way a book actually works, almost nothing about why it succeeds or fails.
Hating Coach K
Originally published in the March 2006 issue Hatred makes scholars of its practitioners, which is to say, all of us. We study the objects of our disdain like old dons in the British Library poring over ancient manuscripts. No less than lovers, good haters notice everything about their enemies. Every tendency, every inconsistency, every speck of newness. Hatred focuses the attention.
American Male Opinionated Chatterbox (Published 2007)
Oct. 7, 2007 The short-story writer George Saunders apparently has a Thing for Capital Letters. His first collection of nonfiction is Chock Full of Them — phrases like “Men Who Fish” and “Big Naïve Philosophical Realizations” and “American Male Opinionated Chatterbox” and “Appallingly Porous Border Syndrome,” to name but a few. These locutions resonate with Wiseguy Knowingness and serve as the literary equivalent of People Making Quote Marks With Their Fingers. They’re kind of flirtatious, too.
Existence Precedes Essence. Yup! (Published 2002)
June 9, 2002 See the article in its original context from June 9, 2002, Section 7, Page 13Buy Reprints TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. ACROSS OPEN GROUND By Heather Parkinson. 248 pp. New York: Bloomsbury. $23.95. LOST NATION By Jeffrey Lent. 370 pp. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. $25. THE SOUND OF THE TREES By Robert Gatewood. 289 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Company. $25.
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