We leave the game unfinished—tiles hidden, scores untallied—and Dad goes to bed.

“Bad mothers run in my family,” states Lillis Yourell, the main character of The Closet of Savage Mementos (2014)…

In Barbara Pym’s memorable 1952 novel Excellent Women, staid bachelor Everard Bone remarks…

During a prenatal visit to her pediatrician, Eula Biss asked about the necessity of the Hep B vaccine…

I knew as soon as I saw her, this situation was going to take some work.

Before Nuala O’Faolain, the Irish journalist and author, passed away in Dublin in 2008 from lung cancer…

In 2011 the Irish writer Kevin Barry won The International Dublin IMPAC award…

On Thursday September 14th 1876, a murder is committed in a one-horse town on the outskirts of San Francisco…

Barry Hannah, the Mississippi-born author of eight novels and several short story collections…

David Shields is half-sick of shadows. Like the Lady of Shalott he no longer wants fiction’s embroidery but real life…

“‘Stay, I tell myself,” thinks Harold Silver, at the end of May We Be Forgiven, “…

In 1895 Punch published a cartoon in which a curate has lunch with his bishop…

The first baseball game I ever attended took place in Baltimore’s peerless Camden Yards…

My latest ‘homework’ was Money (1984), Martin Amis’s comedy about the bling years…

The next time James McBride attends an award ceremony, I imagine he’ll prepare a speech…

Ah, the smug high of having removed another book from my ‘should’ve read by now’ list…

Whenever someone mentions Stoner, we writers turn misty-eyed…

After reading Lolita I would never have presumed that Vladimir Nabokov was a pedophile…

In early 1960’s London, Martin Lynch-Gibbon heads home to his mature and beautiful wife…

Once in a while I begin a new novel and my heart soars. At last, I think, a blessed satire…