May 15, 2018
Finding the Magic Writing Ritual
Writers’ rituals are central to the way they work and are often treated as acts of spirituality or even seance. Haruki Murakami refers to his routine as “a form of […]
January 8, 2017
Snowstorms and Speculation: My Abbreviated 2016 Reading List
I generally don’t make New Year’s resolutions, and I also don’t go out of my way to eat black-eyed peas or sauerkraut on January 1, but I do have a […]
May 30, 2016
The Books We Keep: Part Two
Getting married ushered in a new stage of dealing with things—beginning with registry gifts. Though I had declared I was not going to change—I was still the same person, same […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]