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Like Fire
I discovered hand lettering in sixth grade, one rainy day poking through my mom’s studio in the attic. She had a little graphic design business on the side—on the side of what I was never sure, but between that and the darkroom in the basement it gave her every excuse not to engage with my […]
Read MoreWell, hello. We’re back from a brief midsummer break—thanks eternally to Terry Weyna for holding down the fort—recharged, we hope, and refreshed, with all sorts of good things to share. As much as the labor-of-love aspect of blogging can feel like a liability, it’s unquestionably nice to be able to walk away from something for […]
Read MoreSummer isn’t publishing’s busiest season, but the big books that come out in June and July and August get the benefit of a major shelf-to-beach-towel popular push. And then there are the other four tried-and-true types of summer reading recommendations: the difficult books, which require stretches of undistracted time; the year’s popular books that everyone’s […]
Read MoreThe more job listings I read, the more efficient I get at parsing them. First, of course, comes the position description, to make sure it’s something I can actually do and might even want to. The list of requirements takes a little longer to weigh: which are the slam-dunks (grasp of basic grammar, proficiency in […]
Read MoreSometimes I’m late in keeping current with literary competition news here, and then sometimes I’m criminally late. My lack of commentary on the PEN 2014 Literary Awards would fall into that last category, unfortunately. So I’m going to do my best to catch us all up, starting with the fact that PEN America announced the […]
Read MoreHappy birthday to Jane Gardam, born in North Yorkshire in 1928, and still going strong at age 86. I’ve left plenty of traces of my own Gardam fandom, with a piece in Bloom and a note in Open Letters Monthly’s Year in Reading for 2013. But for years she felt a bit like a secret-handshake […]
Read MoreHow about Never—Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons Bob Mankoff Henry Holt & Company, 2014 As a geeky, funny, animal-loving, endlessly doodling little kid, I basically had two career choices in mind: Veterinarian or Cartoonist. Soon enough I realized that veterinary studies involved a lot more school than interested me, so I […]
Read MoreJuly Fourth is one of those Rorschach holidays—it’s pretty much whatever you want to make it. If you’re patriotic, bless your heart, you can celebrate it that way. If you want to go to a party and drink beer and grill, there’s plenty of opportunity for that. You can just kick back and enjoy the […]
Read MoreIt’s always fun to pull rank on the whippersnappers: Back when there was no cut-and-paste, back when there was no Undo command, back in the days of 3×5 notecards and rubber cement and Wite-Out—you kids don’t even know how to spell Wite-Out anymore, do you? But then there are those who, in turn, put me […]
Read MoreWho doesn’t love looking for work? Summoning your brio, shining your shoes, lying awake in bed trying to come up with a better answer to “Why would you be a good fit for this job?” than “I’d be really good at it and I’ll bring cookies to office meetings”—it’s all character-building stuff, right? Yeah, no. […]
Read MoreSome years ago, I worked at a small journal under an executive editor who was, to put it kindly, very old-school. Curmudgeonly might be another word you would use. Cranky might be a third. Along with the standard editorial duties, a fair amount of my time was spent trying to convince him that the move […]
Read MoreLimber Angela Pelster Sarabande Books, 2014 “To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them – the whole leaf and root tribe.” ― Henry Ward Beecher When it comes to wide-ranging framing devices, it’s always practical to look […]
Read MoreFor those of you who haven’t heard, the Agatha Christie estate is commissioning Sophie Hannah to write a new novel featuring the Queen of Crime’s master Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Among many other qualifications, Hannah’s most recent novel, The Carrier, won the Crime Thriller of the Year award at the 2013 Specsavers National Book Awards. […]
Read MoreIn an interesting and surprising turnaround last week, the New York Public Library decided to scrap its controversial Central Library Plan. The proposed renovation, originally presented in 2008, would have sold off two of NYPL’s properties and opened up space in its iconic central building by relocating three million of the books in its stacks—half […]
Read MoreI didn’t set out to be a spokesman for the Graying of American Arts and Letters. I imagine my experience is the same as that of most former bright young things: for years I was always the youngest person in the room, until one day I looked up and noticed that everybody else seemed to […]
Read MoreI’m enormously gratified to be celebrating Poem in Your Pocket Day once again on this bright and blustery spring day. Not that it ever went away—it’s been happening cheerfully every year, with or without my participation. But the stresses of academic life had distracted me for the past couple of years, and I managed to […]
Read MoreAll the Birds, Singing Evie Wyld Pantheon, 2014 One thing I’ve learned in my brief video editing career: Just because you can produce an effect doesn’t mean you should. And the same for PowerPoint—all those animations, slides spinning in and whooshing out, bouncing arrows and stars and callouts, need only be used once in a […]
Read MoreYou didn’t actually have plans for the weekend, did you? Saturday is the birthday of Beverly Cleary, author of Henry Huggins, Ribsy, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and the Ramona the Pest books, among many, many others. And yes, she’s still with us—going strong at 97, and an honest-to-goodness national treasure, if you ask me. […]
Read MoreThis Is Not an Accident April Wilder Viking, 2014 I’ve been reading short stories for a long, long time. I love them, even—sometimes especially—when they truck in the familiar, the comforting, the well-worn. Those are what I think of as blankie stories, and they have their lovely aspects. But there’s always the little voice in […]
Read MoreJust when you’ve figured out how to talk to your children about divorce, and sex, and terrorism, along comes conceptual art to throw off your average. I’ve never met a kid who didn’t get abstract expressionism on some level, and they all love Richard Serra (other than the not yelling really loud while running around […]
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