In 1982, literary editor extraordinaire Bill Buford was living in London, running the prestigious magazine Granta. He caught a train at a rural railway station in Wales and was soon over-run by soccer (or football to them) supporters who were methodically destroying everything in their path. Fascinated by what he saw, Buford spent the next…
Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans for years, writes an elegy for The Guardian. An editor asked him who could write about the tragic city and although Ford had many names, many possibilities, they couldn’t locate any of those authors. So after recounting many of his finest New Orleans moments, Ford writes “I write…
The American Booksellers Association announced that it is creating a Bookseller Relief fund to assist independent bookstores affected by Hurricane Katrina. Checks should be made payable to ABA/Bookseller Relief Fund and mailed to the ABA’s office at 200 White Plains Road, Tarrytown, NY 10591. Please write “Bookseller Relief” on the outside of the envelope. “Our…
Today’s Book-of-the-Day is The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer by Tom Dardis. The book examines the influence of alcohol on so many American authors. And the list is incredibly long. Five of the seven (at the time of publication) American Nobel laureates–Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck–were alcoholic.…
It’s 93 degrees, with high humidity that chokes like a punch in the throat. I sit in the car, sweating, unable to turn on the ignition, just needing to digest. Part of me wants to call every friend I know and another part of me wants to go mute, to withhold speech for days, just…