[Ben Folds pic by deovolenti]
Through a chain of circumstances too complicated to recount, I discovered a Paper Cuts Blog playlist by Nick Hornby, perpetual resident on my “reliable favorite authors” shortlist, in which he alluded to collaborating with a favorite musician of mine: Ben Folds:
4) Jen and Justin, Ben Folds. You can’t hear [...]

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image “borrowed” from stlog
Donald Finkel is one of those poets I’ve yet to get around to seriously reading but whose poems stand out enough that I actually remember them long after serendipitously discovering them in journals such as The Paris Review and The Chicago Review. Finkel’s name also comes up regularly in conversations and interviews [...]

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[1955 cover from WikiMedia Commons]
Dolores Haze– the “nymphet” of Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest novel (rightfully found in many lists of best novels)– would be 62 this year… in America at least, where Lolita wasn’t published until 1958.
[photo via David Zellaby]
What would Dolores/Lolita be like today? Would she be a brassy, hyper-sexualized doyenne? A dolorous, [...]

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Author of perhaps the only great novel that actually begins “it was a dark and stormy night,” Madeleine L’Engle has died. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that I owe a significant portion of the good things in my life– and a number of lifelong obsessions– to the cornerstone experience of reading A Wrinkle [...]

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Hey, how often does a new t-shirt come out that includes Shakespeare and The Ladies? Ahh, to be young again…

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Via First Draft a snippet from Mark Taw’s This I Believe entry:
I could say that I believe in America because it rewarded my family’s hard work to overcome poverty. I could say that I believe in holding on to rituals and traditions because they helped us flourish in a new country. But these concepts are [...]

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Another good one gone.
Like many, I met Kurt Vonnegut through his much anthologized story, Harrison Bergeron. I was at the perfect age to read it: old enough to understand that this was a different kind of story– one of philosophy and moral and dark humor– but young enough not to be so jaded as to [...]

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I’m just about done with Yellow Dog and really don’t understand all the poor reviews. It’s funny, merciless, and like most of Amis’ work almost off-handedly brilliant. Every other paragraph (and sometimes every other sentence) reveals some kind of little spark of genius… the result is a fire. I know I’m gushing here, which I [...]

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Richard Powers on why he never touches a keyboard unless he has to, speech recognition, and the power and utility of the human voice.

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I’m about 1/3 of the way through Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer and I’m already comfortable recommending it. The subtitle “A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” is apt– you don’t have to be (or wish to be) a writer to get a lot out [...]

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Jack Shafer has it just about completely right in his article calling Ian McEwan to task for his plagiarism of Lucilla Andrews’ memoir No Time for Romance. It’s simple: McEwan stole significant pieces of Andrews’ creation and used them in his acclaimed book Atonement. It isn’t “fair use” because it is not within the conventions [...]

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