ARTICLES BY BLAKE BAILEY
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 STILLE NACHT
By Blake BaileyWhen I came home for the holidays, my crazy older brother Todd-fresh out of prison-picked me up at the airport in Oklahoma City. Our mother couldn't come because she'd invited some friends for lunch and had to stay home and cook. In the crowded baggage area I saw him before he saw me. Amid that crowd of prosaic Okies he burned with a kind of lunatic charisma: eyes wide, head bobbing, bounding around on his toes-a jaybird determined to catch a worm.
He spotted me and bounded over. I dropped my bag and went limp to absorb...
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  A CONVERSATION WITH LEWIS LAPHAM
Lewis Lapham is one of our most distinguished editors and essayists. Called "a connoisseur of the perfect word," he was editor of Harper's magazine for almost 30 years, assuming emeritus status in 2006 to start his own journal, Lapham's Quarterly. Contributors to the current (spring 20...
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 JOHN CHEEVER GOES UNDER
by Blake BaileyIn 1974, John Cheever accepted a teaching position at Boston University, the better to distance himself from his family and drink in peace. One of the first things he did on arrival was order stationery: "John Cheever/71 Bay State Road/Boston, Massachusetts 02215." This enabled him to write desponde...
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 BELOVED MONSTER
The Strange Odyssey of Alfred ChesterOn a sweltering day in August 1971, Jerusalem police found a partly decomposed-and weirdly hairless-corpse in a two-story suburban house near the YMCA. The floors were covered with boxes, their contents exploded around the rooms amid a startling profusion of pill and liquor bottles. Two starving dog...
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