As Autumn Arrives, A Discovery in My Own Backyard I’ve lived most of past twenty-odd years in a sedate suburban town outside of Boston. I always thought it was cool that the Minuteman Bikeway was just across a trickling stream from our house. I could ride northwest to Bedford five miles to my bike shop, […]
Molly Young, “is a book critic for The New York Times, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine and the author of the newsletter Read Like the Wind. She was previously the book critic for New York magazine.” Unquestionably a hard-working journalist, by my reckoning. I’ve read her book reviews in the past and have […]
“Odds and sods” is a euphemism from the British lexicon, which in American parlance simply means bits and pieces. But it’s also the title of one of The Who‘s records, which in its original release wasn’t all that great but when reissed as a compilation included such hits as “Mary Anne With The Shaky Hands,” […]
Stories embody a love of words and ideas. Words are meaning. We use words to convey meaning, in the same was the Bible has God doing so: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The French have a term for the distinctive use of words: […]
I. Trees and Poesy The tree is one of the most magnificent forms of life on planet earth. In just six couplets, eighty words, the British poet Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) penned an ode to a tree to take your breath away with its simple beauty. I grew up in the mountain forests of western South […]
I’ve recently been out and among a number of writers, all of whom want to sell more books. To each and all I ask, Do you have a website? Answers range from “I’m working on one” to “No.” We authors all need a website presence, but I contend it must be interesting, innovative and original, […]
I began my publishing career as a college textbook editor, working with business book authors, most of them college professors. I nurtured books in management, office automation and finance to successful publication, but perhaps the most interesting of them was a book I had inherited from my predecessor: a principles of marketing tome by Thomas […]