For years when I was young I would crouch beneath the dinner table to watch my parents drink after-dinner coffee and wine with an ever-changing group of scientists—a tall man from Colombia whose mustache is even more impressive than my father’s, a shy Chinese man who twice brought me folded paper fans, a thin young woman from India with acetic hair who rarely speaks, but whose murmured jokes can pitch the group into laughter. …more

There is a passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie Nolan, the book’s protagonist, is described as the sum of many parts. A genetic and experiential palimpsest, Francie: …more

Truman Capote famously said that what Jack Kerouac did wasn’t writing, but typing. I take just as much offense today to this slander as I did ten years ago as an undergraduate when first hearing it quoted by an English professor. …more

I had read the book months ago. And then, standing in front of Edward Hopper’s “The House by the Railroad” at the Museum of Modern Art, I found myself trying to explain to a tango-friend from South Africa why this painting—one she wanted to walk past without more than a cursory glance—was important. I wished Edward Hirsch’s book,  The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, had still been in my bag. His poem “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad” gets so much right about the painting, and so much right about the artist as well: …more

I was ten years old when 1999 became 2000. My knowledge of the Y2K problem was vague; I could only glean a nebulous mood of panic from overheard newscasts and conversations between adults. My own parents did not seem worried. We went to New Year’s Eve festivities at a family friend’s house. I was part of a kid coalition that choked down the mature prosciutto-melon appetizers, then huddled in the basement away from parents and their flowing Korbel. We watched five or six hours of a South Park marathon. At midnight one of the adults humorously turned the lights off to invoke–what? Apocalypse? The failing of computers all over the globe? Everyone thought the prank was very funny. That was my Y2K. …more

Based on the true story of an English midland town in the year 1666 that quarantined itself to sweat out the bubonic plague, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague reminds me of the private school campus where I live with my family in the suburbs of Baltimore, the year 2012. We are a small community, and when people get sick other people know it. Our reaction to illness, then, as now, is what is fascinating to me.  …more

It’s easy to write off one author based on a best-seller. Call it jealousy, call it high-end literary disdain, call it whatever you want, but it’s easy to give in to the impulse to distrust something once it’s become popular. This indeed was my reaction to the author Elizabeth Gilbert, who I (as many others) first encountered by way of her memoir-cum-chick-lit classic Eat, Pray, Love. I read her because I felt I had to have hard facts to back up my loathing, and I found facts in spades: her self-indulgent pity, her defensive arguments about the validity of eating pasta and practicing yoga and falling head over heels in love after too much heartache. I wrote her off, and so did many other readers, as fluffy and inconsequential, someone who’d rather gaze at her navel than investigate and report. …more

In the mid-1980s, I fled Ronald Reagan’s America for the jungles of Costa Rica. Before leaving–forever, I thought–I shipped two boxes of paperbacks to the tropics. I would soon read every book from those boxes plus anything else I could grab in hopes of explaining a world gone mad. …more

I’ve been told that it’s harder to make friends once you are an adult because in order to be close to someone you have to be vulnerable.

I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me. …more

The moment when a new book is begun it is a moment that vibrates, as potential energy (a writer’s wisdom distilled into a completed work, printed, bound, placed in your hands), converted slowly into kinetic energy (second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day) with each turn of the page. …more

Was there ever a place greyer, wetter or lonelier than Paris in the fall?

For an Irish person, that’s a weighty question to consider. I guess that in some other incarnation of myself I might have found the glistening cobblestones of Montmartre immeasurably romantic but with my fiancé away on tour and being (scarcely) self-employed, the dampness weighed down heavily on my mood, pushing me into a period of semi-hibernation. …more

One of the first things that became apparent while reading Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins was a gentle spiraling, a contracting of the scope of the novel, from the streets of Bulawayo to the small village of Kezi via the local gathering place Thandabantu; from Thenjiwe and her unnamed lover to her sister Nonceba; contracting into a pinpoint during the murder of Thenjiwe and the rape and mutilation of Nonceba. Flowing with the narrative are lyrical descriptions of the landscape and the “intoxicating scent of marula seeds falling everywhere,” all welcoming the reader into the heart of Zimbabwe. …more

Have you ever read a book about a sensational event that isn’t sensational itself? That manages to transcend the shocking element to reveal a much more interesting and nuanced story, which then helps you begin to comprehend, even if not accept, the things that happen in extraordinary circumstances? …more

I read Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond in a hotel room.

Nowhere fancy: I was in Asheville, North Carolina, facing nothing more uncomfortable than bugs and frogs and humidity, the steady chatter of fat people plunking themselves into the swimming pool outside. …more

We were in the “international bookstore” of Xiamen, China, which is really a Chinese junk and bookstore but has half a dozen shelves of English books (such as Gossip Girl and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). My wife found a Signet Classics edition of The Brothers Karamazov. “Do you want that?” she asked. “You do, don’t you? It looks boring.”

“I’ve already read it,” I said. …more

I read Alice Munro’s books in benders. It usually takes me less than two days to finish one of her collections, and while reading it, I make and break promises to myself—to stop after this story, to take a shower, to run an errand just for the exercise or maybe see a friend (or else around eleven PM, I will find myself regretting how restless and dirty I am, still in last night’s pajamas, which are now exactly my body temperature.) …more

Maps, at their best, are more than representations of the world. They are worlds unto themselves—endlessly explorable, enigmatic, complicated, and alive. I remember the first globe I owned as a kid. I liked to spin it on its axis, as hard as I could, as if it were the big-money wheel from some cheesy game show, Wheel of Fortune or The Price is Right. I’d close my eyes, place my index finger on a random spot and imagine winning a trip to wherever my finger ended up when the spinning stopped. Which, more often than not, was the middle of an ocean, or some distant, exotically-named island the size of a pencil dot—Midway, Guadeloupe, Reunion, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Kiribati, Tuvalu… …more

The last book that I loved was You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers, which is about two friends, Will and Hand, who come into $32,000 around the same time one of their friends dies unexpectedly.

They are devastated by his death, and decide that they can’t keep the money because of the pain it represents. The book unfolds from Will’s perspective as the two friends impulsively embark on a globe-crossing adventure to give the money away to people they think deserve it. …more

There are too many good writers for me to keep track of so, mostly for the sake of convenience, I categorize them: Koontz writes thrillers, Franzen does literature, King fills the world with horror, Snickett delights children.

The problem is that this pigeon-hole system, though it works with some authors, it woefully misrepresents others to the point of exclusion. The thought goes something like this: I don’t need to read Roald Dahl, he’s a children’s author. …more

It was in Crete that I first came to curse short skirts. Six of them — three cotton, two denim — I had with me in a navy blue American Traveler suitcase, which sat, for the duration of my three-week vacation in the small fishing village of Mochlos, atop a rickety luggage rack in the corner of a small bedroom in a thirty euro a night pension. …more

Jena Osman’s The Network is the best freaking thing I’ve read all year!

Talk about brain arousal, wow. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It gave me nightmares the way falling asleep in school only could. …more

According to Europa Edition’s website, Elena Ferrante, one of Italy’s most important and acclaimed contemporary authors, has successfully shunned public attention and kept her whereabouts and her true identity concealed. I understand.

Troubling Love is a brilliant rendering of a woman who looks too closely at love and sex.

…more

Every time I watch a porno—whether it’s Lesbians in the Produce Section or Cheerleader Tryouts with Coach Lester—I start critiquing the plot, the acting, and even the lighting. Why doesn’t, I ask myself, a real director make a porno, a real director with trained thespians and a script from a literary talent; but not just a porno—a smut flick, an all-out fuckfest?! …more

I didn’t need any books: I was finishing up grad school in Idaho and moving to—well—that wasn’t quite known to me.  But here was a building on the Latah County Fairgrounds full of books, and here was Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac among them, a slim Black Cat paperback with a blue Eiffel Tower backed in red on the cover.   …more

How our living selves affect the afterlife has been, and will continue to be, a matter of debate. In literature alone, countless stories have explored the stages of death, of grieving, and that of otherworldly retribution. In Midnight Picnic, Nick Antosca leaves religion out of the discussion and instead explores feelings of abandonment, anger and regret. …more

Why is the second person such a natural and addictive tense–perhaps the only honest one–when writing about drug abuse and a foggy recovery?

For years, you haven’t been able to stop asking this question. Reading Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, you are asking it again, vocally (a real dinner-party silencer), by mistake or with motivations hidden from even yourself.

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I remember being 18 years old, secretly thinking that all the good writers were dead or past their prime. I wanted to be born in the twenties, where wilderness was untamed and fiction was wide open. I knew there must be someone great out there, but the only writers I had loved were the Hemingways and Steinbecks and Fitzgeralds I had come across in English class.

A girl was opening my eyes to some later writers—John McPhee’s Coming into the Country is the perfect thing to read when you’re young, you live in Alaska, and the closest thing you have to a summer job is painting houses and digging the foundation for a cabin with your closest friends. I read Tender is the Night and A Moveable Feast, and this was how I wanted to write. …more

I loved this book. Haunting prose. Exotic locale. Existentialist themes. I stayed up much too late to read it,  enchanted – entranced even –  only to wake up with bags under my eyes and vague memories of desert-sun dreams.

The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, is an incredible story of two people wrestling with (and running from) their freedom, as they rush about between desert towns, chasing a specter as ephemeral as the sand djinn, themselves – their love for each other. …more

Everything from the theme of creation to the understated technique resonates; it is a book of poetry which has inspired both reflection and furious meditations of my own as I spin my own arcs from Bidart’s example. It is excellent art.

Reviews of Star Dust obligatorily quote the following line, and rightly so: …more

“Remember, Lord, my ship is small and thy sea is so wide!” – Joshua Slocum, sailing through a storm south of Tierra del Fuego.

When Joshua Slocum (author of Sailing Alone Around the World, first published in Great Britain by Sampson Law in 1900) arrived in Apia, Samoa at the house of Robert Louis Stevenson on July 16, 1896, he was a third of the way to becoming first person to sail single-handedly around the world. …more