Wayne Grady grapples with the sometimes outlandish demands of his dead relatives, who metamorphose from real people into fictional characters once he begins to write their story.

When terrible things happen, we like to believe that our suffering has an endpoint. But within the psychiatric profession, a faction—including Stephen Grosz, author of The Examined Life—believe "closure" is a myth, and maybe a harmful one.

Even while writing about the mafia, life under fascism, and Silvio Berlusconi, the underlying theme of Alexander Stille's journalism has been about collective memory and how we conserve the past. With his recently published family memoir, The Force of Things, Stille has created one of the great cultural and social histories of the twentieth century.