What can we learn from the simplicity of yesterday’s marketing techniques? I’m at my writing retreat in Florida, where the sun shines most of the time and the grass grows all winter long. I walked out to my mailbox the other day and saw a piece of something that didn’t look like it had fallen […]
Via the Serendipity Express, two science-fiction novels have recently crossed my panoply of reading. Or perhaps have trudged should I say they have come across my literary desert, in search of a shared oasis? Or flew in from the internet of (paper) things? In any event, by divergent routes, these two books ended up on […]
Would you like to do something fun? Interesting? Challenging? Read on. Paris. Night is falling. I’m standing on the Rive Gauche. I can hear the Seine and see some lights across the river. Must be the Notre Dame Cathedral. But the lights are odd. Thinking if Paris is the City of Light, there ought to […]
I’m often puzzled by the contemporary craving for instant need/want fulfillment. The media types seem to have turned the American populace into trained monkeys, clamoring for a seat at a new movie the first day it’s released or signing to get a publication-day copy of the latest book so you can be the first to […]
Not to be confused with Edward Bellamy’s fine novel, I stand at the cusp between 2019 and the 2020, the new decade of the new millennium. Looking backward, as my favorite book critic Dwight Garner writes in his latest “Critic’s Notebook” in The New York Times, about the year gone by and what, for him, […]
We live in a world overpopulated not only with people but with books. I’ve heard there are currently about a million books published each year. This plethora of storytelling is diffuse: hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, ebook, audio – what we once called books on tape. The one constant among these formats or versions […]