Regan Daley Discovers Daemons I was one of those kids who read voraciously. If there wasn't at least one book on the go and a stack waiting, panic set in. I started around age six and continued in more or less the same way until well into my twenties. Then I had kids. Many kids, and all at the same time. The first thirteen months after my twin sons were born... (read more)   Ben Mezrich on His Hemingway Obsession As a writer, OCD is a real occupational plus; the same neurosis that forces you to wash your hands twenty times a day and obsess about the most minute, pathetic detail of your life, gives you the ability to sit at a computer for twenty straight hours contemplating the placement of an article or the proper usage of a gerund... (read more)   M?rquez Sends Judy Reene Singer Back in Time Close your eyes. Think back to your childhood. Think back to that exquisite moment just before you begin to play. That moment of decision, when you sift through your imagination, picking through all the possibilities, feeling that soaring rise of the infinite, that dazzling sense of... (read more)   Esmeralda Santiago Marvels at Hopkins's Mastery It was the end of a long day running after my young children. Baths taken, stories read, foreheads kissed, monsters banished, they had finally fallen asleep clutching their raggedy, much-loved stuffed animals. My husband and I had settled on our sides of the bed, under our personal reading lamps, he with a novel and I with The Norton Anthology of Poetry... (read more)   Michael Cunningham on the Joys of Genre Fiction A while ago, I ran into a friend who told me he was on his way to have sex with a guy he'd just met. I asked him whether it was a nascent romance, or just meaningless sex. He looked at me quizzically and said, "Have you ever had meaningless sex?" Of course I hadn't. There's no such thing, is there?... (read more)   Marc Acito Takes the Artist's Way I should have been happy, but I wasn't. I mean, after nearly ten years of pursuing an operatic career, I had finally scratched my way to the middle. Proving that sheer ambition trumps natural talent, I had parlayed a minor vocal gift into an occupation playing an odd assortment of singing hunchbacks, drunk sidekicks and mad... (read more)   Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Can't Decide on Just One "Memorable" means many different things to different people. Some books have haunted me, such as As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto: an incredible story of medical hubris. Or The Death of Innocents by Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, even more of same. And never mind scientific hubris, how about hubris on a much larger scale: A Problem from Hell by Samantha Powers; read and weep... (read more)   Rebecca Brown on Classic Wartime Reading Two nights ago I finished reading Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. I was sitting up in bed next to my peacefully sleeping spouse. It was a lovely summer night and the windows were open and the night was still and the sound of my dear love's breathing was so sweet and calm... (read more)

Martin Clark Finds Big, Bad Love There are two things I know for sure: The best song ever recorded is Robert Earl Keen's "The Road Goes on Forever," and the finest short story ever to see paper, with a tip of the hat to Miss Welty and John Cheever, is Larry Brown's "Big Bad Love." I was twenty-three years old with one year of law school behind me, living... (read more)   Justin Cronin on Book with Thumb Ten years, the whole of my thirties: the decade in which I married, became a father, grew up. Like most writers, I read a lot of books, and I have loved my share. But to be the parent of small children is to think of books differently than you used to, back when reading a book was something you did by yourself, in silence.... (read more)   Garrison Keillor on American Poetry Library of America's American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, a big boxed set of old old poets from Longfellow and Whittier and Poe through Whitman and Dickinson, was a big jolting experience to this old English major, including as it does my dad's favorite poets in there along with the few we studied in college English. Walt Whitman and Emily... (read more)   Sara Nelson Crosses the Great Divide One of the most pivotal moments in my life as a reader came, embarrassingly enough, about ten years ago when I was already well into my thirties and had been working as a journalist and a book reviewer for some years. My editor suggested I take... (read more)   Kurt Andersen Opens the Cabinet of Wonder My most memorable reading experience of the last ten years? I assume we are talking about published writing. And therefore the letter from my mother that I first read upon her death last spring — twenty-three handwritten, yellow legal-pad pages, sixteen years in the making, repeatedly amended, filled with the usual necessary but banal details about the disposition of stock certificates and soup tureens as well as breathtaking asides about the meaning of life — doesn't count... (read more)   Eric Jager Goes Back to Pompeii Two years ago, during a trip to Italy, my wife and I spent a few days at Pompeii. One day we took a bus to the top of Mount Vesuvius and hiked around the crater of the volcano that erupted in 79 A.D., burying Pompeii. From the volcano's rim, high above the humid plain surrounding the Bay of Naples, it took a while to... (read more)   Don't Bother Win Blevins, He's Reading I wear a tee shirt emblazoned: "Don't Bother Me, I'm reading." It's a heartfelt sentiment. Once, however, being interrupted worked out beautifully. Goldie was what you might call our local bookseller. Here on the edge of the Navajo Reservation, Goldie's was the nearest book store, sixty-three miles... (read more)   Luanne Rice on the Power of the Right Poem I'd been wandering in the desert. You know the one: not the hot, sandy treeless plain out there in the world, but the dangerously arid, overly familiar resting place in your own mind. I had some decisions to make — difficult choices that challenged who I thought I was, the woman I thought I had to be. To prolong making them, I found myself... (read more)   Bruce Haring on Labor History I read an interview with Michael Moore the other day regarding the reasons he made Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore related how he has been spat upon and vilified for daring to ask tough questions and taking a hard line on certain unpleasant truths in his film. It's "anti-American" to question those in power during a time of war... (read more)   Samantha Ettus's Discovery at the Yellow Umbrella When my fianc? proposed, we went up to the Cape to spend a romantic weekend relaxing. For us that means long walks, reading, and generally spending coveted time together. I had forgotten to pack my book so we stopped by an old bookstore in Chatham, Massachusetts, called The Yellow Umbrella Bookstore... (read more)