"Machismo got a bad name starting with the feminist movement, where it was used to label male behavior that women found offensive," the novelist Robert B. Parker once told Amanda Smith in a Publisher's Weekly interview. "But if you called it a commitment...

One well-guarded secret in the press is that nobody necessarily agrees on the terms governing the guarding of secrets. "Deep background," "not for attribution," "off the record"--the specific interpretation varies from reporter to reporter and source to source. Now Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has made things...

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973, by Harry Mathews. Dalkey Archive Press, 203 pages, $13.95.A few weeks ago, the arts section of The New York Times turned its solemn eye on literary fiction. On Monday, the fine novelist and short-story writer Steve Stern...