Fiction

Long Black Veil: A Novel

Chapter 1

LONG BLACK VEIL is a literary thriller, my first fiction for adults in 20 years…

The First Televised Summer Olympics

The following is an excerpt from my novel, The Longest Night, published earlier this year by…

A Single Brown Mother on the Arrest of Her Son

Mi’jo’s canon in D major

It was two weeks before Christmas 2009. At 26 years old, my talented, college-educated, gainfully employed son with a young daughter committed a senseless robbery and was arrested…

Absolute Data Corrupts Absolutely

Economic inequality and persistent surveillance push Oakland to the…

What’s Your (Past-Life) Story?

I’m looking for your stories — those moments or events that caused you to think differently about how we exist. Maybe it was something your child said. Or something odd you “remembered.” A dream you had, or some unusual, intense connection with a stranger.

Men at Work: The Unexpected Freedom of Writing Male Characters

My first novel is set in the late 1950s in a host of locations, including a nuclear reactor floor and an Army base in Greenland. Sometimes, when I tell people this, they look at me a little funny. My own mother, an avid…

A Kidnapping on a San Francisco Beach

A girl disappears into the fog of Ocean Beach, leaving no clues behind. Where has she gone?

HERE IS the truth, this is what I know: we were walking on Ocean Beach, hand in hand…

Fictionalizing the Rosenbergs

Exactly 25 years to the day after Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed, I was born. While my mother was laboring in a hospital in Philadelphia, the Rosenbergs’ grown sons were still protesting the anniversary of their parents’ deaths in a demonstration in Union Square in…

Benediction

How this food writer returned to fiction, and the importance of teachers and coincidences