Another in my series of picks from my perusal of the Sunday New York Times Paid Death Notices.

These are written by family and friends of the deceased, and each one tells a great, true  story.

GOLDFARB--Aron. Holocaust Survivor and Founder of the G-III Apparel Group, beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather passed away after a long ( Read more... )

THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!! 

From April 2008, but new to me:

Glaswegian fantasist (Vellum and Ink) Hal Duncan* explains the finer points of m/m activity** to the sender of some hate mail.  And picks his teeth with what's left of them.

* You might also like Hal's expletive filled, loving and empowering 8-minute "It Gets Better" rant.  Or you might ( Read more... )

or, "Why Should I be the Only One Laughing this Hard?"

OK, so on my FaceBook page today encouraging everyone to talk about Women's Fencing, the subject of Bats came up. (Don't ask - but feel free to trawl the page to find out!)  And I referred to one of the great Bat Stories of my youth - when we all lived on W. 110th Street, and found weird stuff ( Read more... )

From this week's New Yorker magazine
by Zach Kanin


( Read more... )

Absolutely wonderful piece on the author of "Downton Abbey" (& screenplays of "Gosford Park," Vanity Fair," "Young Victoria' - which we recently saw & were suprisingly impressed by; now I know why - "Emma," etc.), Julian Fellowes, in this Sunday's NYTimes Magazine.  Everything he says sounds right to me - I particularly loved this, though:

"I don't ( Read more... )

"Often the less you do, the less you can do. And the more you do, the more you can do.

"So lighten your load with care, or nothing will get done."

Words of wisdom from my good friend Isabel Swift.* Read the whole thing here*We met when we were both assistant editors at Pocket Books, in adjacent carrels.  We shared the pretty Georgette Heyer ( Read more... )

George Saunders:

I’d make the case that the whole fictional thrill has to do with this idea of the reader and the writer closely tracking, if you will. Like one of those motorcycle sidecars: when the writer leans left, the reader does too. You don’t want your reader three blocks away, unaware that you are leaning. You want her right there with you, ( Read more... )

We saw Punchdrunk's Sleep No More on May 4th.  deliasherman  wrote about it here - and I strongly recommend Daniel A. Rabuzzi's literate, lyrical, descriptive  post here about it on his delightfully-named (and ever stimulating) blog, Lobster & Canary.  They both think it's a very interstitial work, and I don't disagree.

Did I love it, you'll want to know?  Well ( Read more... )

Ursula LeGuin on China Mieville's Embassytown (in The Guardian - UK):
 "There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different - aliens?"

The Atlantic Monthly's PROJECT:  FIRST DRAFTS offers some pretty great artists' takes on "the sometimes messy, frequently maddening, and almost always ( Read more... )

Yes, I did it! I wrote *5* Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books for Bantam/Edward Packard back in the day. Recently the delightful Molly Tanzer interviewed a few of us original writers - and readers! - and.... series creator Ed Packard himself!  What a nice guy he was - and clearly still is.  And now her piece on CYOA is up on Fantasy Magazine's online ( Read more... )