“The Gospel According to Shug” from the novel The Temple of my Familiar by Alice Walker (author of The Color Purple). The bold and underlined are my favorite quotes from one chapter of this book. The word “helped” ought to […]
John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction set off a firestorm of controversy when it was first published in 1978. He argued that contemporary literature (and art) suffers first and foremost from a baisc failure of the test of “morality.” By this […]
Deep Travel is an exhilarating state of mind that travel can evoke, when everything seems suddenly fresh, vivid, intensely interesting, and memorable. Because you focus on what you’re looking at and listening to, Deep Travel is like waking up while […]
My mother is lying in bed, tired. She says: I don’t think it is healthy to read Franz Kafka before you are trying to go to sleep with a heavy backpack of thoughts you have been carrying all day. I […]
Our first night in Vienna my mother and I walked around, exploring without a map as per the routine for the first night anywhere new, and I noticed what I thought was the infinity symbol. My obsession with the infinity […]