A passage from Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s Travels with Herodotus, originally published in Poland in 2004 and just published in English by Knopf. In this excerpt, the author talks about what it was like to read Herodotus–or, more specifically, why one did not have the privilege of reading Herodotus–in Poland in 1951:
The Herodotus manuscript arrived [...]
So I finally got around to watching I Gotta a Crush on Obama, wherein a voluptuous young woman who calls herself Obama Girl prances about in short-shorts singing about her thing for “B.” It’s hilarious and actually kind of on point. I may have muddled a couple of words here, but here’s a sample from [...]
Nice review of the anthology Logorrhea, edited by John Klima, by Mark Graham for the Rocky Mountain News:
Highlights of the anthology include: Hal Duncan’s The Chiaroscurist about an artist who uses a local dwarf to represent the face of God in a fresco that takes nearly a decade to complete; the title story, Logorrhea,in which [...]
I’ll be reading at Book Passage in Corte Madera tonight at 7:00 p.m.
I remember in high school when the drivers’ ed. teacher asked me if I knew how to drive. “Yes!” I said. I didn’t want to be stuck in the simulator room with the kids who said “no,” avoiding crashes on the big screen when I could be avoiding them in real life. Problem was, I’d [...]
For the novel I’m working on now, I’m researching coffee–history, production, and modern growing, cultivation, and distribution practices. Although most of us coffee devotees possess a vague, back-of-the-brain consciousness of the suffering that coffee has caused historically throughout the world, we probably stop short of thinking about what our own coffee habit means to rural [...]
Had a lovely conversation with Pat Montadon (Oh the Hell of it All) yesterday at the Book Group Expo in San Jose, a two-day event that brings authors and readers together. We talked about her current project, a book about her famous Roundtable lunches in San Francisco, which brought together the famous and infamous, the [...]
At five p.m. on December 16, my mother called me into her study. I waited until she said my name twice, so I didn’t appear too eager.
There is something quietly heartbreaking in these words, spoken by the narrator of Vendela Vida’s lovely second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Some years before the [...]
I love pie, and I loved this description of a pie shop, which emerges as an eerie, mysterious clue in Chapter 6 of Michael Chabon’s strange and clever new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union:
The place is nothing more than a window that opens onto a kitchen equipped with five gleaming ovens. Next to the window [...]
The one-woman star-maker has chosen Middlesex, the sprawling gender bender of a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, as her next book club pick. This Pulitzer prize winning novel already got a load of well-deserved attention–now Jeffrey Eugenides will be signing autographs in the street. I taught this book in my graduate craft of the novel class [...]
