In book-crazy families, sharing summer reading material is nothing new. Parents enjoy kids’ books alongside their children during bedtime reading; high school students filch J.D. Salinger from their parents’ collections; mother...

When Michael Moss’s book Salt Sugar Fat was recently excerpted in the New York Times magazine, the cover was just a picture of a Dorito with an enticing pull quote: “I feel so sorry for the public.” I, for one, was hooked, and ...

Well, it’s finally happened: I’ve jumped on the eReader bandwagon! After mulling over its pros and cons (have a look a the details of my thinking here), I settled on a Kobo eReader, and I’ve now been a proud owner of one for ab...

In a culture where we spend childhood reading The Baby-sitters Club, high school and college English classes pressing through the classic novels our teachers foist on us, and adulthood keeping current with the Gone Girls of the...

There’s a handy quotation, generally attributed to William Faulkner, that always seems to crop up a few weeks into any creative writing class: “In writing, you must kill your darlings.” The idea is that, sometimes, the essay or...