My latest NPR appreciation is of Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of previously unpublished writings by my favorite essayist. Here’s an excerpt: Best known for crowd-pleasers like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his lucrative speaking tours, Mark Twain was a writer whose livelihood depended on maintaining enough down-home affability to appeal to the masses. Yet as we . . .
Like Geoff Nicholson, I enjoy revolting meals in novels (e.g.). The blog literary food porn is stoking my interest in fictional food of all kinds.
Reading Theodora Keogh last year, I was amazed not so much that I’d never heard of her, but that it seemed almost no one had either. More recently, Blake Bailey’s comprehensive biography of John Cheever underscored for me just how many writers, acclaimed in one decade, end up forgotten. Below Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the . . .
Marie Mockett’s first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, appears later this year (excerpt here). I’ve started talking about it so far in advance not so much because she’s my friend, although she is, but because I’m passionate about the book and want to do everything I can to spread the word. Below she discusses some of the themes I’ll emphasize . . .