At some point in every story, writers are writing home. They are setting the reader down in front of the family TV (David Sedaris), or by the ghost at the...
Reviewing. Could there be a more delicate matter? Open a book. Read the pages. Opine. About another's ideas and fantasies. About another's obsessions and grammar. About another's particular and possibly...
Sometimes they let you choose. They present a list of possible books for your review, and the crushing what-if of it all falls on you. Choose the wrong book and...
When we write about the writing of memoir, we are stuck, up front, with the lexicographer's dilemma: How do we define the word? Is memoir, for example, an autobiographical poem?...
I couldn't decide who I was while reading Sonya Lea's intense, unblinking marriage and identity memoir, "Wondering Who You Are." I was sympathetic and concerned, but also discomfited. I was...
Clamor imperils the reading life. The promotional high jinks that announce wholly average books. The tease of adverb-laden blurbs. The authors testifying to their own genius. Then along comes Kent...
Kindness. The word is scribbled throughout the margins of my copy of George Hodgman's new memoir, "Bettyville." If you think of that word as a sentimental squish, if you believe...
In 1988, Robert Atwan, series editor of "Best American Essays," made this provocative pronouncement: "Never before — except perhaps in the days of Emerson and Thoreau — have so many...
I want to read the memoirist who is uneasy with ease. The one who doubles back, isn't sure, scuffs the page with maybe. Who knows something of the art of...
Gary Shteyngart, gooey-lunged and height-a-fearing, arrives in America by way of the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) in the beseeching care of parents who might have been/could have been Someones. By...