Steve Szilagyi is the author of the novel “Photographing Fairies”, which was short-listed for the World Fantasy Award, and made into the feature film of the same name, produced by Mike Newell and starring Ben Kingsley. He worked in public relations and marketing at HBO for eight years, and went on to write for a large academic medical center, where he produced articles, speeches, books, and edited publications. He has written magazine journalism and more than 80 book reviews for the daily press. A graduate of Columbia University, he won that school’s Bennet Cerf Award for Writing. Email: szilags [at] gmail.com
by Steve Szilagyi PrologueMost people visit the James A. Garfield Memorial to admire its Victorian splendor, or to pay respects to a forgotten president. I go for another reason: my great-great-grandfather carved some of its stone. If Garfield had lived out his term, the man might never have come to Cleveland, never met the woman…
by Steve Szilagyi You don’t need to be told that Halloween yard decorations have gotten tackier over the years. Complaining misses the point. Their jokey vulgarity is the point—as if America in 2025 were so buttoned-up that people need yet another occasion to act out their bad taste in public. Front lawns have always been small…
by Steve Szilagyi Henry James once observed that Robert Louis Stevenson “wrote with a kind of gallantry — as if language were a pretty woman.” C.P. Snow (1905–1980) did not write like that. Pretty did not seem to enter any area of his work. The author of the famous essay The Two Cultures and the…
by Steve Szilagyi I’m writing a Broadway musical about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter who anticipated the entire aesthetics of the 20th century before 1915. Her rediscovery in the 1980s scrambled the timeline of modern art history. My creation isn’t going to be one of those post-Lloyd Webber mega-musicals, but something more along the…
by Steve Szilagyi The suburban lawn. It’s as loaded with symbolism as it is with chemicals. That perfect green expanse stands for everything people hate about people like me: the smug squire in his tony ranch house. I wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1980s, I was an Upper West Sider who laughed with…
by Steve Szilagyi How would you act as a great ship slipped beneath the waves? Freeze? Panic? Leap into the sea? If you were a man, would you quietly help women and children into the lifeboats? We all wonder. Elbert Hubbard wondered too. In 1912, less than a month after the Titanic vanished into the…
by Steve Szilagyi The year was 1960. Kennedy, U-2, the Twist. Our family now included two parents and nine children. The house was too small for us. Our father searched the inner-ring suburbs for something bigger. He got a deal on an enormous house nobody else seemed to want. The seller was an Italian-American grocery…
by Steve Szilagyi A curious part of getting old is seeing people you knew in life turned into bronze statues. You preserve a vivid impression of some laughing, breathing person; they disappear for a while; then they pop up again as a stolid, staring statue. The transition from flesh to effigy can be disquieting. Heroic…
by Steve Szilagyi Edgar Watson (E.W.) Howe (1853–1937) was a small-town newspaperman who became nationally known for his plainspoken wit, tart epigrams, and relentless skepticism. “I must make everything so simple that people will see the truth,” he once said. His sayings—blunt, dry, and often astringent—were the fruit of decades spent editorializing in the Atchison…
by Steve Szilagyi Those first eight thunderous notes—”Oh Fortuna, velut Luna”—delivered by a massive choir of a hundred voices, have become as instantly recognizable as Beethoven’s da-dah-dah-DUM or the opening of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Since John Boorman first deployed O Fortuna in his 1981 film Excalibur, this choral juggernaut has stampeded through many horror films,…
by Steve Szilagyi June 1846 was the hottest month ever recorded in London at that time. For 22 sweltering days, temperatures soared between the 85 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The city’s literary luminaries—Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle among them—mopped their brows and grumbled about the oppressive heat like common mortals.…
by Steve Szilagyi Andreas Grüntzig’s plane blew a 38-foot-wide crater in the Georgia dirt where it crashed. Investigators needed several days to collect and identify the remains of the famous physician, his second wife, Margaret, and their two Irish setters, Gin and Tonic. People who write about Grüntzig after his death compare him to a…
by Steve Szilagyi The Naked Gun trilogy was a series of three film comedies released between 1988 and 1994. They were directed by David Zucker, who founded a new school of parody with his breakthrough movie, Airplane! (1980). Part of Zucker’s genius was casting grim-visaged actors from serious films and letting them loose in a…
by Steve Szilagyi My favorite place on Earth is Niagara Falls. I refresh my spirit there. Standing on the very brink, my chest pummeled by the roar of millions of gallons of fresh water plunging into the abyss, I feel at one with figures like Margaret Fuller, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, each of whom…
by Steve Szilagyi My friend Ian worked hard all his life. In his seventies, he bought a big house and moved his son’s family in with him. It’s the classic multigenerational setup, and it seems to be working out. Only one thing bothers him—the zombies. “My son and his kids love the whole zombie thing,”…
by Steve Szilagyi Herb Gobel opened Trophy Recording in downtown Boston in 1948. It was a state-of-the-art studio. Perfect for the artists Herb idolized. Big bands like Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton. Vocalists like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. An era of composers, arrangers and sight-reading musicians. By the time I saw Trophy Recording in…
by Steve Szilagyi “Body and spirit are twins. God only knows which is which” –Algernon Swinburne When I was ten or eleven, the Great Geauga County Fair still displayed what it called human oddities (the term Freak Show had fallen from use by that time). These included the Lizard Man, the Human Pincushion, and the…
by Steve Szilagyi An air of the erotic hangs over “Norman Rockwell: The Scouting Collection” – a show of 65 paintings by America’s master illustrator currently on display at the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio. The pictures came to the Medici Museum after a Los Angeles Times article revealed that the Boy Scouts…
by Steve Szilagyi After eight years writing publicity for a cable television network, I was let go. Just in time. I was hankering to get out of Manhattan, go back to my hometown, and marry a girl I knew in high school. Once I’d gotten all that out of the way, I found myself in…