Ivebeenreadinglately

I wrote this in late 2008 on spec for a publication, but it was never published. My notes remind me that after writing it I came across a po...

"How did you get over it?" "I watched Sal Mineo in Rebel without a Cause , and I thought, 'I can't be the only pe...

  Below is a survey of Kazuo Ishiguro's whole career that I wrote back in 2009 for the "Quarterly Conversation" a site that, a...

Chicago closed its lakefront parks in mid-March, after an unseasonably warm day brought crowds of a size that was worrisome at that early st...

  One of the very few notes of grace that has been vouchsafed us by this awful year is the position of Labor Day, which, perched as it is on...

   Hoo, boy, it's been a long time since I wrote, huh? Back in late January, when I restarted this blog after five years away, I said my...

Feeling a little scattered these days. Aren't we all? How to get back some coherence? Henry James, from his notebook, March 29, 1905:...

A mention by a friend on Twitter yesterday got me thinking again about the best new novel I read last year, Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newbur...

{Anonymous art seen today on my block.} I woke up this morning trying to remember whose was the last hand I shook. It was probably ...