I’ve made my list and checked it twice, and thought I’d share my favorite writing-related gifts with you. Put a few on your wish list, or give them to a writer you know. I’ve linked to products like the ones on my wish list in the middle column.
Even though my fingers are in motion, they [...]
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been [...]
… an essay without a bit of both abstract reflection and winning anecdote–without a tear to raise and a point to score, without an unimpeded argument and an obvious “I”–isn’t quite an essay. The ideal essay has facts and feelings, emotions and thoughts, an argument about and an anecdote from, parallel and then crisscrossing, all [...]
The narrator of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a masterwork in himself. He’s omniscient, though he sometimes pretends he isn’t. He’s able to interpret all actions, though sometimes he declines to. And he’s mockingly objective about what he describes, except when he chooses to convey the rightness of his observations through his own response [...]
I read it on MSNBC. I saw it on at least two national TV news broadcasts. And it turned up on my gold standard for all news: NPR. Have you heard? As health writer Melissa Dahl reports, “New research shows that happiness isn’t just an individual phenomenon; we can catch happiness from friends and family [...]
Like most writers, I never go anywhere without a notebook. I’ve tried just about every kind, from dime-store, pocket-sized spiral notebooks to pretty, fabric-covered books. But all of them had their drawbacks. Then a writer friend gave me a pocket-sized, paperback Moleskine journal. Shannon, in addition to writing (she’s the author of Everybody Loves Ice [...]
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley
This book was a Christmas gift a year or two ago. I’ve picked it up and put it down several times since I received it, mostly because it doesn’t seem to break much new ground. Smiley has some useful things to say, but they’re buried in [...]
When the summons arrived from Anna the Matriarch, Lisel did not wish to obey. the twilit winter had already come, and the great snows were down, spreading their aprons of shining ice, turning the trees to crystal candelabra. Lisel wanted to stay in the city, skating fur-clad on the frozen river beneath the torches, dancing [...]
It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even [...]
There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness [...]