“A four-year-old girl and her babysitter called from the library, and pointed out through the window the smoking top of the north tower, not a mile away.” That’s how John Updike found out about 9/11, according to the Talk of the Town story he wrote for the September 24, 2001, issue of this magazine. In that issue—the first published after 9/11—Updike and eight writers grappled with the September 11th attacks: Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim. That special Talk section is now available online in its entirety; you can read it here.
