In " Swim at Your Own Risk ," a short story I published earlier this year, 8-year-old Tammy tells her best friend that six months after her grandfather died, “Grandma died of a broken heart.”  While the narrator thinks he knows better, there is some medical basis for her claim. Napoleon's Farewell to Josephine (circa 1891) by Laslett John Pott.   Broken Heart Syndrome, also called Takotsubo syndrome or stress cardiomyopathy, is a rare but real condition that is thought to aff

How many basic plots are there in fiction? Writers and academics, have posited that there are  anywhere between 3 and 36.* The relative merits of these ideas, and which plots are universal across cultures, might be a discussion for another time, but as a reader, I have to confess that the one that most reliably resonates with me are those of leaving home with a subsequent return or reunion.   Sitting squarely in that category is Anne Enright’s The Green Road  (2015), a beauti

At the very last possible moment – the show’s run ended on September 14—I had the pleasure of attending a performance of the Public Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night  at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. For the Delacorte faithful—many audience members return year after year—the production has been a long-time coming. The theater just reopened after an almost two-year period in which renovations designed to make the venue more accessible and comfortable