After stalking the bargain shelves at Barnes & Noble, I bought A Tale of Two Cities. I like the beginning of Tale (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”) and I like the end (“It is [...]
It happens to the best of us. Between birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and holidays, at some point you’re going to forget to buy someone a gift. But with just a bit of planning ahead, you never again have to suffer through [...]
Kelly Williams Brown’s self-help manual for twenty-somethings reads like an encyclopedia of the best advice from the best moms and dads, except Brown is a cool chick in her late twenties. It’s chock full of tips, no-brainers, tough love, and [...]
Chapter Six: The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead Or, Taking the Fun Out of Functionalism Man, my sparkly pastel highlighter got a workout on this chapter. A lot of -ologies and -isms and -ists and all other [...]
For years now, James Joyce’s Ulysses has been in a Mexican standoff with Tolstoy’s War and Peace and DFW’s Infinite Jest, each vying for the title of Most Abandoned Novel. Ulysses is the shortest of the three, but that’s like [...]
Happy Father’s Day! Here are some profoundly moving literary and historical quotes celebrating, honoring, and remembering our fathers and some of their most sage advice. “I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd [...]
Tomorrow marks my second official Father’s Day, but I’m counting it as the first, since all I can remember about last year’s was that it involved a colicky two-month-old screaming, screaming, and screaming some more. I’ve learned a lot in [...]
To help you pick your hot-weather reading wisely, we asked a few literary insiders what they recommend for beach bags and road trips this summer. And how much more insider can you get than between the covers of a book [...]
Did you have a favorite childhood author whose work for grownups, you discovered as an adult, turns out to be pretty racy? I did. I’ll never forget reading Shel Silverstein’s MacBeth in the late nineties in Playboy magazine, and the [...]
