Jimmy Buffett’s new cookbook will help you grill and chill
Say what you want about Jimmy Buffett (and I will?I can’t stand his music), but the man knows how to make a buck. (And it’s not genetic?contrary to what many believe, he is not related to Warren Buffett.) But Buffett (the Jimmy one) has transformed the art of the three-minute pop song into an easy…
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The last Yiddish bookstore in New York City
With so many Jewish-Americans living in New York City, and with Yiddish being a language that?s still very much alive, one would think there would be at least a few Yiddish bookstores dotting the metropolitan area. But there?s only one?CYCO (pronounced ?SEE-koh?) Publishing House, located in Long Island City, Queens, an area that, while not…
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The Brothers: A tragedy decades in the making
Through a recent conversation about Russian politics, I learned about Masha Gessen?s 2015 book ?The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy,? about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnaev, the brothers behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Both had been written off as radicalized Chechens whose newfound religious zeal caused them to avenge their Muslim brothers,…
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NaNoWriMo: The endurance test that may lead to a bestseller
November is National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, when Great American Novelists scramble to write 50,000-word manuscripts in 30 days. What began as a 21-person contest in 1999 is now led by an Executive Director (Grant Faulkner, no relation to William) and has become a literary success, with nearly half a million people…
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Love is a baseball field: “Shoeless Joe”
?If you build it, he will come.? Besides ?Shoeless Joe,? there are few sports novels (actually, none that I can think of) that have such an iconic line. W.P. Kinsella connects with it on page one. ?Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robbin?s-egg blue and the wind…
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