We all have stories. We hold them close, for stories are the most potent form that memory can take. We carry them around with us, carefully polishing and honing them in the telling and re-telling, until they become integral parts of our identity.

I’m not having a good day. I have a splitting headache. I’m at a truck stop in Milesburg, Pa. waiting for the New York bus. My so-called book agent in Manhattan—a guy named Aubrey—is not returning my calls.

“Was it the drink was his ruin,” asked Hugh Kenner of Flann O’Brien in A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers, “or was it the column? For ruin is the word. So much promise has seldom accomplished so little.” By the end of his life, “a great future lay behind him.”

This is the end. My only friend, the end. See, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jim Morrison and the Doors and Apocalypse Now. I’m not alone. Charlie Sheen is drawing much of his snappiest patter from Coppola’s Vietnam flick, in which his old man Marty co-starred.

Legendary burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee was not easy to categorize. The former vaudevillian—who became a big star in New York during the Depression after being discovered by burlesque impresario Billy Minsky—befriended such gangsters as bootlegger Waxy Gordon.

Mickey Mantle’s image looms over American sports like a golden god from a time only dimly remembered but still strongly felt. The consummate blend of power and speed ever to play baseball (he was clocked going from home to first base at 3.0 seconds, the best time of his era), his prodigious 500-foot blasts created the term “tape measure home run.

Given the seriousness and pretension with which so many rock critics write about their favorite artists, you might expect an academician to bury Dylan beneath mounds of stentorian prose. But Wilentz is no ordinary academic. For one thing, along with Griel Marcus, he edited The Rose and The Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad.

Jeff Canja, an authority on pulp magazines, explains the essential difference between literature and most popular story telling.

Wilfrid Sheed once quipped that there were so many books about the Mob that “We now know everything about it except whether or not it exists.” We know for sure that Al Capone, America’s most famous and cinematic gangster, did exist, but a new biography, Get Capone–The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster.

Any real fan of professional baseball can tell you a little bit about the late, great African-American pitcher Satchel Paige, born in Mobile in 1906. Maybe they’ve read about his first game as a rookie with the all-black Chattanooga White Sox in 1926, when the wild young pitcher impressed everyone with his velocity but also hit virtually every player on the opposing team. Perhaps they know that Paige, after years in the Negro Leagues—including a stint with the Birmingham Black Barons—got his shot in the majors with the Cleveland Indians in 1948 at the age of 42 and managed to finish the year with the second-best ERA in the American League.