Fannie Farmer’s Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent and Robin Bellinger’s “Feed a Fever, Starve a Cold” inspired my latest New York Times Magazine mini-column. Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) when you’re sick you need something other than a hot toddy.
At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner wonders “whether, on average, people are lonelier in real life than in novels.”
“Lost things have their own special category. So long as they’re lost, and felt to be lost, they belong to the imagination and live more vividly than before. They make a mystery.” — Sven Birkerts, The Other Walk. Birkerts’ best personal essays are steeped in an anxious nostalgia that is, in intensity if not in focus, all too familiar to . . .
I spoke with the Nervous Breakdown’s Brad Listi for an hour last month about writing, blogging, day jobs, personal stuff, and why I’m not reviewing nowadays. You can listen at Other People Podcast.
On the heels of news that Junot Díaz will have a new collection of stories out this fall, the Times reports that he wrote the introduction to the Library of America’s forthcoming reissue of the pulp novel Princess of Mars.