News and Thoughts

I’m the kind of person who writes our family’s holiday letter in January, except for the one year I kept promising it to people until July, and then decided guiltily that since it was then closer to the next year, I ……
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My friend Justin St. Germain wrote a book, Son of a Gun, which I had already very much wanted to read even before it won this year’s Barnes and Noble Discover Award in Nonfiction. It’s the story of Justin’s life ……
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At 5:45 today, I woke from a nightmare that 100,000 Iraqis, fleeing our bombs, had been herded into an Iranian refugee camp, and they all needed to pee. There wasn’t room for them all in the camp, but those who ……
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“Have you read the Goldfinch?” This Vanity Fair article suggests it’s the cocktail party opener of the summer. I’m pleased to report that hasn’t been my observation in Canada, where I have spent the summer, but true enough in my ……
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Here is my stop in an author blog tour, a self-interview equivalent of a chain letter, except nice. I was tossed this opportunity by Devyani Saltzman, a writer and literary programmer who I first met when she brought me to ……
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Another very kind letter from a reader, republished with his permission. I wanted to post it here not only because of his very kind praise but because it includes a personal recollection of the era of the bombing, the perspective ……
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Rajiv Kalsi, whose sister was on the Air India flight whose bombing seeds my novel, wrote me a letter, reprinted here with his permission. Mr. Kalsi’s email was enormously moving to me. Novelists cannot know, and must renounce a desire ……
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Adam Gopnik has a very entertaining and thoughtful article in last week’s New Yorker summarizing the detection efforts of two teams of antiquarians: one that believes it has a reference book that once belonged to Shakespeare, and another that has ……
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