Speaking of authors who write well about their families, I heartily recommend Bettyville by George Hodgman, published a few months ago by Penguin. It's about his decision to stay with his elderly mother in Paris, Missouri after arriving for what he thought would be a short visit. This is a book I obtained a couple of weeks before flying to St. ( Read more... )

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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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I keep up with the news in my home territory by reading the web page of WJBD Radio, a station in Salem, Illinois, the next town over from my town, Centralia. It seems that the high school drama club is staging the dramatization of Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase, about a struggling young teacher at an inner-city New York high school. Small ( Read more... )

I love 'em, and you can see their web series at http://www.youtube.com/user/BroadCity and listen to the audio New Yorker feature about them at http://www.newyorker.com/online/ ( Read more... )

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... )

Good old Walt ( Read more... )

I'm tuned into CNN, which has a camera on the block where Phillip Seymour Hoffman lived and died, and just minutes ago the NYC Medical Examiner pulled up in an ambulance outside his building. The street has been barricaded to keep away gawkers. Because his death was unexpected and not under a doctor's care, the ME is always called in. It reminds me ( Read more... )