If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! Elin Hilderbrands'Barefoot'opens with a scene akin to a drawn-out framing shot in a Steven Spielberg movie: through airport attendant Josh Flynns eyes we see three woman disembarking from a plane,...

I once worked with someone who rather reminded me of a tragic pelican. He had this strange, gulping way of speaking, almost as though his words were fish that he was trying to choke down, and these sad, sad eyes that are endemic amongst those employed within the public sector. He would speak at length about his rebellious past working in a library; and at any...

      My family is one thats full of strange rifts and cracks: a grandmother whos sealed herself off from both her own family and her husbands after being slighted as a young woman; an uncle who will drive three hours to put in an appearance at a family event and then hightail it after hes finished his first beer;...

  Like many readers probably are, Im fascinated by recursion: by sentences that can carry on forever through the syntactic links of subordination, and by narratives that fold in and over themselves, a literary homunculus. In particular theres something about books about books and authors writing about authors that I find utterly compelling....

  Ive never been able to read in a neat, linear manner, working in orderly fashion through whatever is sitting by my bed. Rather, I tend to find that each book I read in some way makes way for some other book, a book that might have been sitting on my shelf for years, or that I might finding myself rushing out to buy. I read a comment yesterday that...

Im here with a public service message: though BA Shapiros The Art Forger is being billed as a literary thriller, in all honesty its nothing of the sort. Its plot may draw on the 1990 Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum art theft and extrapolate from there, but really its about the passion of the creator, the pure love of art itself. And...