I'm a great fan of Oliver Sacks, both his writing and his image.He's soon publishing a memoir covering his early adult years in California and New York, which were apparently pretty exciting times, and about which he's already written a bit in Hallucinations. On the Move: A Life, due out in June, sounds thoroughly cool.


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There have been several books in recent years about writers and drinking, so each new one needs a different twist. An effort last year by Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, features the British author traveling across the United States from New York to Washington State, with a few stops between. It's a very personal ( Read more... )

Even when I was twenty, thirty, or maybe forty, I knew it was a bad idea to walk around in 92-degree heat and high humidity while wearing long pants and a backpack full of books. Anyway, now that I'm closer to sixty than fifty, it's still a very bad idea. I comfort myself with the memory that it bothered me when I was, for example, 23 years old and ( Read more... )