. Are you trapped in a Muriel Spark novel? I put together some clues for The Toast: You believe you can make insomnia work to your advantage by deciding what to think about. You identify communist intellectuals from the variety of dyspepsia remedies on the bathroom shelf. Such bad luck! You killed the nanny instead of your . . .
Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea may be my favorite of his novels yet. I spoke with him for Barnes and Noble Review. Here’s an excerpt. CRL: Someone asked me, “Is that the difference between a Western hero and an Eastern hero?” MN: What did you say? CRL: Maybe. I don’t know. But the Western heroes we know — in literature, it’s . . .
I wasn’t sure when exactly the announcement became official, which is the reason I held off on posting this here, but I’m excited and delighted to report that my employer, Thomson Reuters, awarded $3000 to Girls Write Now last year, as part of the company’s 2013 “Community Champion” awards, because of my volunteering there. (By day I work in TR’s . . .
The last time I stayed with my father in Miami over the holidays, I made the mistake of thinking he was lonely. I had a bad habit of trying to decode his emotional state from external markers, in this case his threadbare green bathmat. Part of a towel set my parents acquired when I was seven or so, it had . . .
On a rooftop of a prison in South Africa Nelson Mandela tends garden and has a birthday, as my Jamaican grandfather in Harlem, New York raises tomatoes and turns ninety-one. I have taken touch for granted: my grandfather’s hands, his shoulders, his pajamas which smell of vitamin pills… (Read the rest at Graywolf.)