Envy Apartment

Lit Life “She is my alter ego,” says Sue Grafton of her fictional heroine, Southern California private detective Kinsey Millhone . “I’m an introvert, so doing half of what Kinsey is beyond my poor capabilities. But it’s fun to get to live her life without penalty!” Grafton, on the phone from her home in Montecito, California, is the best-selling author of what’s known to countless mystery fans as “the alphabet series .” The project has become Grafton’s life’s work, beginning with “A Is for Alibi” in 1982 and continuing through this month’s publication of “Y Is for Yesterday” (Putnam, $29). The final book in the 26-volume series, “Z Is for Zero,” will be out in 2019. And while the rest of us have aged several decades, Kinsey’s gotten only a few years older. Early on, Grafton said, she realized that even if she wrote a book a year, “after 26 years [Kinsey’s] going to be way too old to be running around hitting bad guys with her pocketbook. I thought I’d better keep her credibly young, ...

Illustration by Luke Shuman Ben Rothenberg | Racquet and Longreads | August 2017 | 9 minutes (2,122 words) Our latest Exclusive is a new story by tennis writer Ben Rothenberg and produced in partnership with Racquet magazine . To hear Alexander Zverev Sr . tell it, the tale of how his younger, golden- haired son began to play tennis has the simplicity of a fairy tale involving the Three Bears. “It was all natural for Sascha,” he said. “Mama played, Papa played, brother played . And so, he started to play.” While the Williams sisters have made family reunions in the finals of Grand Slams feel normal , multiple branches of a family tree breaking through to the top of the sport remains a rare phenomenon. This is particularly so in the men’s game, where brothers have rarely shared space in the top 200 together over the past decade. But in a sport that demands individualism, the Zverevs have managed to become the archetypal tennis family , a story line that’s become increasingly prom...