Let’s Just Read

A simple drawing of students in a classroom—all but one seated, all but two with hands raised—illustrates the cover of Liza Wiemer’s novel, THE ASSIGNMENT. The title is stamped in bold red caps, the author’s name in smaller white type … Read More

A member of my Novel in a Year cohort (Marie Deaconu-Baylon) recommended Brit Bennett’s debut novel, THE MOTHERS during a class meeting a couple of months ago. Marie mentioned she knows Bennett personally, as they were undergraduates together at Stanford … Read More

The dozen writers in my Novel-in-a-Year cohort at StoryStudio Chicago are all serious readers as well as writers. Over the past months, they’ve pointed me toward THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, THE IDIOT, THE AGE OF LIGHT, and now Marilynne Robinson’s … Read More

My favorite bookshop is Fair Isle Books on Washington Island, Wisconsin. Though the size of a small bedroom, Fair Isle is everything a bookstore should be. Its petiteness in fact makes everything simpler—one doesn’t waste time browsing through books one … Read More

A week or so before “The Call of the Wild” (the movie based on Jack London’s famous novella) opened at the Iowa Theater here in Winterset, I happened to read somewhere that the dogs in the film are computer generated … Read More

It’s been a long time since I read THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, and quite a few years since I saw a performance of HAMLET, but as I entered the world of novelist Elif Batuman’s THE IDIOT, I thought frequently … Read More

Each month, when the Novel in a Year cohort I’m part of meets in person in Chicago, we catch up with each other on how our work is going, critique excerpts from two members, and receive master-class instruction on craft … Read More

I’ve never lived in Mississippi, but my mother was born there in 1908. When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, she took my brothers and me “home” from Houston to Rockport, near Hazlehurst, several times. In my … Read More

I had not discovered Luis Alberto Urrea’s work until members of the Washington Island Literary Festival selection committee began looking at potential authors for last year’s event. Urrea’s collection of short stories, THE WATER MUSEUM, knocked my socks off, but … Read More