Fiction, Writing, Articles, Essays, Reviews.
I just finished watching the Netflix six-episode series “Behind Her Eyes,” a supernatural psychological thriller based on a novel by Sarah Pinborough. The series was entertaining enough, but it tried to pull off a genre-switch halfway through that strained credulity. You may or may not appreciate the big twist at the end. What did capture my attention in the series was the astral projection...
Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for each of his last two novels (The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad), an unprecedented literary achievement. Ten years ago, before either of those novels were published, Whitehead blended literary and genre writing and came out with his zombie apocalypse novel, Zone One. I’ve long been a reader of literary fiction although have never been a reader of...
I had a strange email recently from a woman I did not know. I usually delete emails from strangers without even opening them. But this person was clever in getting my attention by appealing to my vanity. She wrote a compelling subject line. “I liked your novel Clean Break.” Of course I opened the email. I could use a little stroking. Who couldn’t? But that wasn’t the purpose of her...
I’m conflicted that the company managing the estate of Dr. Seuss decided to stop printing and licensing a number of the author’s books. Their reasoning is that “the books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” The books were written in a previous era, when cultural expectations were different. They included what are considered today to be racist images and stereotypical portrayals of...
A sound or a movement alerted me and I sat still for a moment listening, hearing nothing, feeling the prickly sensation along my spine of an intruder. I carefully raised the shade and peered through the window and we locked eyes, me and this nocturnal visitor. A buck, because close to the top of its head I could see jagged nubs remaining where its antlers had been shed. Where there’s one deer...
Dia Beacon is located in a former box-making factory in Beacon, NY. Huge spaces have been transformed into experiential art galleries. Some of the installations are fascinating, and some are head-scratching. All of it is an immersive, altering experience. Reservations required in the time of COVID due to limited capacity. The space is enormous, with few people about. From the Measurement series...
There’s a good chance the person you love, or just happen to be talking to, is not feeling super well. Along with exacerbating a lot of other awful things, COVID-19 has coincided with a steep rise in mental health disorders. Forty-one percent of adults have reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depressive disorder over the past year. Only 11 percent had reported those symptoms before the pandemic...
The title turned me off at first. Molly’s Game. Sounded young adult or chick flick, two genres I don’t watch often. Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice the film when it came out in 2017. But then I discovered Jessica Chastain was the star. She’s on my list. She appeared in two movies I thought were excellent and I highly recommend: Take Shelter (she plays the wife of Michael Shannon, another...
Cross here? What do you think? Looks pretty good. Better than downstream. The ice is strong right here. Just a little slush on top. What about out the middle? I don’t know. It looks okay. How deep is the water? Just a couple of feet here. But out there, over your head. Great. What do you think? Sun’s out. It’s a warm day. You don’t think we should? What are we going to do on the other side? I...
That’s an email I got from my literary agent, about a year ago. How I appreciate the beauty and precision of a clear and concise email. I’ve given workshops called “Mastering Business Email.” I hammer on the need to be clear and concise in your purpose, meaning, and word choice. My agent, although she didn’t attend my workshop, checked all the boxes on that email. There’s also the...
I would have been twelve, thirteen, this moment I’m remembering. My mom, Irene Klein, was back at work part time taking X-rays for an orthopedic group, my dad working long executive hours. Vince was my mother’s young work colleague and she’d him invited to have dinner with us. My sibs and I squeezed him in at our sagging plank table on the screened porch, sticky fly traps dangling overhead. Vince...
One of those goddamn depth-of-winter days when the snow is sooty, the sky relentless gray, the trees dismal brown. You force yourself out for a run and make it as far as the cemetery but sure enough your foot aches, you step in a deep cold puddle, and you’re going to die someday. This chaotic black chemistry that is you. Then the freezing rain starts like someone mocking me. I lower my gaze...
We didn’t exchange cards this year. We didn’t even send Valentine’s to the kids, who are now young adults. It’s not that we’re not filled with love—we are. But a manufactured day of love doesn’t move the needle for me. I’m not sure when I first started eschewing this holiday. Certainly not when I was a kid, when my mom would overdose us with candy conversation hearts, cinnamon red hot hearts, and...
Illustration by Peter Hamlin You can only get the shot if you are designated 1A. You can get the shot if you are a health care worker. You can get the shot if you fly an airplane. You can get the shot if you live/work in a nursing home. You can get the shot if you work in a restaurant. If you are clever and devious enough to cut the line. You can get the shot if you are tech-savvy and can...
Sadly, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was not a student in one of my writing classes. If she had been, she never would have come up with this statement constructed in the passive voice: “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”MTG A general rule in writing is to choose the active voice over the passive voice. Here’s the difference between them: If MTG had been using the...
I recently read The Vanishing Half (review here), about a young, light-skinned Black woman who makes the life-altering decision to pass as white, and the anxiety and stress that dog her life from that point on while trying to protect her secret. The novel, written by a young Black author, Britt Bennett, is currently a New York Times bestseller. After reading The Vanishing Half, I turned to...
To feel young again on a chilled winter night skating on a frozen pond across the choppy ice To feel young chasing a puck and slapping your stick calling for a pass or attempting one More than scoring a goal your goal is to remain uprightand not smack your brittle bones on ice as hard as concrete To feel the freeze in your fingertips and the run in your nose To hear your skate blades carving...
This blog post is about blogs, so it’s a meta post. I have two favorite blogs that I regularly read. One is published daily, while the other comes to my inbox twice a week. I know and love some people who are having a hard time right now. Two of the biggest reasons are a feeling of isolation and loneliness due to the pandemic, and anxiety and distress over the fraught political situation and...
The narrative structure and storytelling of Charles Wu’s quick-read “Interior Chinatown” are like no other novel I’ve read—and I’ve read a lot of them. It’s part screenplay for a cop show—Black and White—being filmed at the Golden Palace restaurant, and part interior monologue of the protagonist Willis Wu, who plays Generic Asian Man/Dead Asian Man/Background Oriental in the margins of the show...
Sometimes I’ll reproduce here an interesting letter that I get at my other site, an advice column I write. Here’s one that came in recently. Dear Dave: I’ve been trying to stay clean because when I don’t, things tend to happen. For example, last night when I felt the desire to use I went out for a walk. I’ve been told this is a self-care strategy that can tamp down the urge. It was a...
