Sans Serif

I was at Walgreen’s yesterday when I overheard a man at the pharmacy counter asking for face masks. “This is our last box,” the pharmacist said. The man glanced around to see if anyone was looking. I swear he gave me the evil eye right before he snatched the box from the pharmacist’s hands and [...]

I’m now blogging for the San Francisco Chronicle, as part of their City Brights feature. Visit my SF Chronicle blog here.

I met Georges and Anne Borchardt at Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. The couple co-founded their literary agency in 1967, and are known for introducing American audiences to the work of Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Pierre Bourdieu, Marguerite Duras, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Eugene Ionesco, Jacques Lacan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Elie Wiesel.
When [...]

I’m popping the champagne cork today. (Okay, not yet, I’m at home alone at 10:00 in the morning, so champagne would be entirely inappropriate, right? Oh, but there’s the trusty mimosa: champagne delivered with just enough OJ to make it a bona fide breakfast item.)
NO ONE YOU KNOW has been nominated for the Northern [...]

Check out the latest in the land of Nutcracker Buck–”You and me and these five random cubes/Laughing off our asses while our lives go down the tubes.” Wade has this to say about the song: “The song is kind of a white trash love song and a prayer to the Yahtzee gods that a marriage [...]

I just came across the cover of the Spanish translation of The Year of Fog, Perdida en la niebla, out next month from La Esfera de los Libros. I think it’s pretty!

Tune in to KQED today at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time to hear my City Arts and Lectures conversation with Paul Auster, which was recorded at the Herbst Theater in September. Auster talks about his latest novel, Man in the Dark, his writing process, politics, Scotch, and what it’s like to have an assistant, among other [...]

My husband and I celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary on Monday, which prompted me to revisit some of our wedding pics. We got married in Yosemite National Park and honeymooned in Hungary, which was brilliantly cold and romantic in January. Eight years ago today, we arrived in Budapest; both of us had been there before, [...]

National Geographic Traveler magazine recently asked me to name my favorite Golden Gate Park destination. I chose the playground at Koret Children’s Quarter. Pick up the December issue of National Geographic Traveler to see what other Bay Area folks have to say about the park: San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, artist Maya [...]

The South China Morning Post included The Year of Fog in its year-end roundup of “ultimate recession-proof gifts:”
An unusually imaginative novel of family, loss and hope, The Year of Fog tackles mysteries of time, memory and the human heart. ~Stephen McCarty
Having spent a month in Hong Kong back in 1998, and having vivid memories of [...]