I’ve been squatting in the firebombed (was it?) city of Bellona with Samuel Delany in spare pockets of time for what feels like years. (It’s been weeks.) (Not even through the first quarter.) Structural integrity has been compromised. Electricity is spotty. We read the local paper by candlelight for the hot goss. At least the gas works. Dhalgren is...

I started off with Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which I couldn’t put down because it gave me a reading bug. I was like, could I become a gamer?  The answer is no, and probably, never, but the way Zevin depicts the craft of video games, play, and friendship made me consider a new life holding a controller. As the winter thawed...

Sprint with me. I started the year by reviewing Elizabeth McKenzie’s sophomore novel Dog of the North for the New York Times. For context, I also read Dog of the South by Charles Portis, a contender for funniest novel ever written. In March, I covered Philip Roth Fest for Esquire, so for several weeks I prepped for that. I reread some or all of Portnoy’s...

My reading is unsystematic and all over the place.  Below are some of my discovered gems from a year’s worth of book-diving. The Book of Eve. This is a wildly imaginative, zany and inventive book by Mexican novelist Carmen Boullosa, about the first woman, correcting all that nonsense in Genesis about Adam from a feminist point of view. Perplexing...

I wrote a short novel because I like short novels. I am also a museum girl, raised at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where I worked for 25 years. I like books to feel like going to an art exhibition, an experience that consumes you in a single visit and then lingers because of the images the author has conjured in your head. These are the books that...

2023 was a whirlwind of a year. While I waited and worried for my book, The Loneliness Files, to make its debut I had a lot of nerves to calm. Writing about your own internal and external loneliness and then handing it over to the world is kind of a big leap to take. It was easy to slip a little bit deeper into those feelings of isolation and disconnection...