Frank O'Hara

Reporting from Maui — We've been batting our way through W.S. Merwin's yard for a couple hours, swatting mosquitoes in the streambed under the dark wet canopy of towering, philodendron-draped mangoes and looking at some 700 species of palm trees,...

The Physics of Imaginary Objects Tina May Hall University of Pittsburgh Press: 160 pp., $24.95 In hard times, as you well know, fewer risks are taken when it comes to potential profit and potential loss. In the publishing world, this means less...

Jim Carroll, who died Friday of a heart attack at 60 in Manhattan, was a legend by the time he was 13. That's when the poet Ted Berrigan took him to visit Jack Kerouac, who took a look at some of Jim's writing and said, "Jim Carroll writes better prose...

When money will have nothing to do with me, when the only voice I hear is my own and all my books are having a great laugh at my expense -- especially Lowell who doesn't think I'm a man at all -- I go to the café and sit among my amigos. The woman...

When Grace Hartigan was a little girl, she was bewitched by gypsies. In the 1930s, the Travelers still roamed the countryside in nomadic caravans, and young Grace would shinny up the apple tree in her parents' backyard in Newark, N.J., to spy on them....

Grace Hartigan, an Abstract Expressionist painter once hailed as the leading female artist of her generation who later turned to teaching and led a Baltimore art school to national prominence, died Nov. 15 of liver failure at a nursing home in Timonium,...

"The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" was first published back in 1988 and immediately tagged a "brat pack" novel, causing its author, the then preposterously young Michael Chabon (he was still only in his early 20s) to be spoken of in the same breath as Bret...

Shiver me timbers R.L. Stine, author of the beloved "Goosebumps" series of creepy, crawly stories, is heading to "HorrorLand." The ghoulish theme park will be the springboard for 12 new tales, with Scholastic Books planning to release the first two...

Poems 1959-2009 Frederick Seidel Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 510 pp., $40 In September 1968, a wide-ranging New York Times lifestyle piece headlined "Central Park's New Era: Fun for Everyone" took the measure of several New Yorkers, including a college...