1963: To borrow a line from Frank Sinatra, it was a very good year. Many fine works saw the light of day in 1963, some celebrated and some unsung—but to get to the point, a lot of good books were published. (I bet you thought you knew where I was going with that, didn’t you?) [...]

The writer is a passionate animal; two writers in the same space, physical or virtual, will lock horns pleasingly often. I say “pleasingly” because—let’s face it—watching articulate types go at it is always fun. Sometimes these feuds raise real questions; more often they’re vaguely embarrassing to all parties involved. Once in a while reputations are [...]

P.S. The parts underlined in green are links… there’s one thing that doesn’t translate too well from paper to pixel. (Paper: Field Notes FN-01 graph paper notebook. Pen: Lamy Safari.)

I remember very little of what I read in my high school English classes. Some titles have stuck: Jude the Obscure, 1984, Émile Zola’s Germinal, the requisite profusion of Shakespeare. But given four years in a class that was supposedly my favorite, those are some terrible statistics. Granted, a lot of that is probably due [...]

If I had a little more time on my hands, or at least a little more patience, this would be the time to make up some cards for Book Award Bingo. Short lists are out this week from the National Book Critics Circle, The Tournament of Books, and my perennial favorite award ceremony, The Story [...]

Frances and Bernard Carlene Bauer Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013 Carlene Bauer’s debut novel, Frances and Bernard, reminded me why I enjoy reading letters so much, either in collections of correspondence or as epistolary fiction. Letters are a step up from journal writing in their self-conscious display of innermost philosophical workings, and when done right they’re [...]