Taken as a whole, the essays in The Cabin present the closest we have yet to come to a memoir from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, and Speed-the-Plow. The pieces in this volume are spare and pointed: episodes, both terrifying and thrilling, from childhood; impressions of a romantic young man; the strangely familiar tales of a traveler; and eerily exotic moments of retrospection.