B & Me

A funny, frisky, often outrageous book about love, literature, and modern life. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker published U and I, the fretful and handwringing—but also groundbreaking—tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging, entertaining writing about reading, but what no story of this type […]

Wm & H’ry

The more than eight hundred letters of the correspondence of William and Henry James span half a century and amount to the most comprehensive exchange in existence among figures of such deep and wide-ranging influence.  The correspondence was published in full only in 1994, when the University of Virginia Press released the last of three volumes dedicated […]

The Story About the Story Series

Writers and critics have always approached writing about reading differently. Most of us are familiar with the latter group: the theoretical critical enterprise that has resulted in the five-paragraph essay with which all high school students are inoculated against the effects of good books.  The Story About the Story Series suggests an alternative: the writers’ methodology.  Writers […]

The Hospital for Bad Poets

Full of cryptic twists, philosophical quandaries, and fabulist turns, J.C. Hallman’s stories elucidate an intuitive understanding of the human condition. A holiday bete-beche between a bachelor uncle (secretly enamored with his offstage, married “beautiful lady friend”) and his synecdochical “family” finds resolution in a nephew’s potent alliance. An alienated young man discovers the meaning of […]

Say Anarcha

In 1846, a young surgeon, J. Marion Sims (“The Father of Gynecology”), began several years of experimental surgeries on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha (“The Mother of Gynecology”). This series of procedures—performed without anesthesia and resulting in Anarcha’s so-called “cure”—forever altered the path of women’s health. Despite brutal practices and failed techniques, Sims […]

In Utopia

In 2005, J.C. Hallman stumbled across a scientific paper about “Pleistocene Rewilding,” a peculiar proposal from conservation biology that suggested repopulating bereft ecosystems with endangered “megafauna.”  The plan sounded utterly utopian, but Hallman liked the idea as much as the scientists did—perhaps because he had grown up on a street called Utopia Road in a […]

The Devil is a Gentleman

Hallman first read William James’s seminal book The Varieties of Religious Experience in college. The book’s adventurous spirit and its compassionate take on the world of believers returned to him years later when, on a whim, he visited the Unarius Academy of Science, a UFO group in California, on the occasion of a failed prophecy. It was […]

The Chess Artist

Hallman first met chess master Glenn Umstead in a dealer break room deep in the bowels of an Atlantic City casino. The two became friends, Hallman tagging along as Umstead performed blindfold chess exhibitions or gave lessons to young students. Umstead was obsessed with the game: a chess monk. Shortly after the odd friendship began, […]

Other Writings

Essays, Reviews, and Interviews.