Steve Almond

I discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s work at the onset of that long fever known as adolescence. We didn’t have smartphones back then to rescue us from the twin plagues of doubt and boredom. So we walked around with ancient devices tucked into our back pockets. These devices had only one app. You opened them and scanned …

I In the summer of 1955, at the tender age of fourteen, I ran away to sea. The vessel upon which I staked my escape was a fifty-two-foot yawl captained by an Episcopal bishop, Thomas Gulliver Mayhew, the descendant of missionaries, a wise and gentle man who was also, as is sometimes the case, a …