I’m afraid this issue of my newsletter will contain only news, rather boringly about me. This is what comes of having a book published. There’s still t…

“All do not all things well,” sang Thomas Campion, and one thing that I don’t do well is the last few weeks before publication. My husband and I were t…

In his forthcoming memoir And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? (August, FSG), Lawrence Weschler quotes a psychoanalyst who remembers an occasion when his friend…

“We are like trapped flies with our feet not in honey but in venom.” —Eudora Welty, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” Why are you so married to realism? my …

You aren’t supposed to comment on the dust jackets you post in the #sevendaybookcoverchallenge, and you’re supposed to string it out for seven days, an…

This morning, while walking the dog, I looked down to see two earthworms, whom the dog and I had startled, suddenly abandoning their copulation—like tw…

Once, when I was little, my family went on a drive-through safari, the kind where humans stay safely in a car while lions and giraffes roam freely. I r…

A few days ago a friend sent me a link to “Sea Scrivener,” a 1944 comic-book biography of Herman Melville: A little Billy Budd seems to have gotten mix…

I seem to be writing a newsletter. No idea what I’m doing here. Until yesterday, when they melted, there were these enormous shunting-togethers of disc…