Jean Wilson Stafford, a brilliant practitioner of the craft of fiction, has few equals among the post-World War II generation of novelists and short-story writers who worked within the literary modes and conventions of the realistic tradition. Early in h...

Jean Stafford has defined the role of the novelist as that of telling the truth: "the problem is how to tell the truth so persuasively and vividly that our readers are taken in and made to believe that the tale is true, that these events have happened an...

Background The Merriam-Webster Word Central Online Student Dictionary (http://www.wordcentral.com/) defines a zoo as "a collection of living animals kept for showing to the public." This is part of what zoos do today (and mostly what zoos used to do.) They offer people...

THE VETERINARIAN APPROACHED CAUTIOUSLY AS the bongo watched warily. The vet, Lyndsay Phillips, wore jeans, sneakers, a turquoise sport shirt and a ratty brown National Zoo jacket. He was armed with a pole tipped with a needle full of anesthetic. The bongo, a...

A jaguar's lethal attack on a keeper at the Denver Zoo has renewed the debate over whether big predators should be kept in captivity in the first place.Ashlee Pfaff, 28, died Saturday after she was mauled by a 140-pound jaguar named Jorge. The jaguar was...

A jaguar's lethal attack on a keeper at the Denver Zoo has renewed the debate over whether big predators should be kept in captivity in the first place.Ashlee Pfaff, 28, died Saturday after she was mauled by a 140-pound jaguar named Jorge. The jaguar was...