We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! Roughly two weeks ago in the dining room of a Jewish deli on the Upper West Side (whose name, for legal re…

My novel, Balls, is a book in which the protagonist contracts testicular cancer. I'd done an extensive amount of research, but I still wasn’t an expert. I needed one, lest I publish a work that didn’t get it all right. The fear of this had me up at…