“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.”
Dorothy Parker
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is the MFA programs
First, Tim Parks’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is unspeakably brilliant and remains for me, nearly twenty years after its publication, as close to a religious experience
I’m shocked! Shocked! Serious novels lack cultural relevance!
Nevertheless, this Weekly Standard piece by Roger Kimball is worth reading. In “The Great American Novel: Will there ever be another?” Kimball argues that the novel has lost its former cultural
Buy books. Refuse to read them. Impress your friends.
Yes, I know it’s the Huffington Post. But this gem caught my attention, from a truly bizarre article called “12 Books You NEED on Your Bookshelf”:
But if you're going
Something like this really happened.
A waitress in a local coffee shop was complaining to me and everyone else about being 47. Her body aches with middle age. Her eyes hurt. She hates it.
Riffing on your age






.