AWP is a few weeks away and, despite my well-documented anxieties about the whole shebang, I'm particularly looking forward to the book fair this year. When I'm not hunkered down at the Gulf Coast table hawking our new "Sexy Lady" issue, I'll be scouring…

Alone in my apartment, I still prefer to listen to music on my iPod. There's something about the immersive experience of music through headphones. There's something about the way I can sing along and not have to hear my voice as I do so. Perhaps it's…

I used to love ghost stories, back when death didn't seem so real. When I was young, my dad often took my brother and I camping. At night we sat around the fire, roasting marshmallows, and he told us about monsters, aliens, and ghosts. We lived in New…

As all of our worlds grow a little smaller, the monopolization of less influential cultures by more dominant ones accelerates us toward one culture. While other countries lean toward a more polylinguistic society in their educational system, in America…

I watch a lot of ridiculous television. Normally of the very-attractive-young-people-pining-after-other-very-attractive-young-people type, with diversions along the way from people who think they can sing/dance/sew things, but are really just there for…

One occupational hazard of writing is finding yourself frequently susceptible to strange obsessions. You might argue writers depend upon them. One of my latest is fungi and mushrooms, and I freely admit: that is a pretty weird fixation to have, if not…

Last week I had one of those book-shopping experiences that are becoming rarer by the day: I walked into a bookstore; I asked the bookseller for help finding a title; the bookseller led me to the book on the shelf, no computer search needed; and then…

In an address to the 2012 Whiting Award winners, later republished in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Eugenides takes as his theme a piece of advice Nadine Gordimer once offered Christopher Hitchens: "A serious person should try to write posthumously." Hitchens…

Ah, the dreaded occasional poem: feared by high-school bards, bane of poets laureate worldwide, secretly abhorred by all writers with patrons for a very, very, very long time. Graduations, inaugurations, coronations--occasions of state such as result…

As hackneyed and clichéd as it is, I cannot bear the fact that time passes. I'm always talking about it. I obsess over it, and my friends find it incredibly annoying. But you have to understand that I was a very neurotic child, and for some reason I never…