You’ve heard that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about judging books by their titles? Despite the perennial admonitions from good-natured and tolerant book-lovers, I daresay we all do it all the time: take on...
Last week I wrote about the complementary lost arts of letter writing and handwriting. Literary correspondence, once such a venerable genre, just hasn’t been the same since the advent of e-mail and text messages. And yet the ep...
When’s the last time you put pen to paper and wrote a letter? Not an e-mail, not a quickly jotted memo, but an actual hand-written letter, with the date at the top, a more or less formal term of address (you can never go wrong ...
I recently encountered the useful literary term “dirty realism.” It was coined by Bill Buford, former editor of Granta magazine, to describe American literature of the 1980s, including authors like Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff,...
What makes the difference between those books you just can’t tear yourself away from, and the ones that take a lot of time and determination to finish? “It was a real page-turner…I just couldn’t put it down…it kept me up long p...
A curious hobby Graveyards are some of my favorite places to explore. Not for any morbid reason, mind you. I don’t find them spooky (though I don’t tend to walk through them at night) or even melancholy. Instead, I browse the g...