Recently, I wrote a review of John Updike’s Bech at Bay, a book  I didn’t want to read but did.  Now I’ll turn to two books I have yet to read but hope to do so. The first is The Hunting of Hillary, by Pulitzer prize-winning biographer Michael D’Antonio. The second is Pelosi

“Sorry I didn’t respond to your email sooner. I’m recovering from a mild stroke.”  The voice at the other end of the telephone belonged to a writer whose play-reading I’m producing. Naturally, I gasped to hear his news. Already, he’d faced so many obstacles in his life it

Democracy can’t be left in the hands of the rich, I’ve decided.  No, I’m not a socialist or communist or any kind of “ist.” But this pandemic has demonstrated with needle-sharp clarity that Scott Fitzgerald was right.  “The rich don’t think like us.” If anything, he

While thumbing through a magazine, I came across writer Anne Tyler’s confession that she feared to concentrate upon a bad idea because it might come about. She holds herself responsible for the coronavirus pandemic, in part, because for some time she’d been praying for an excuse t

Because of the coronavirus, she was wearing a mask which made it difficult for me to identify her, at first.  She was walking her dog, which I did recognize, but the cane her right hand came as a surprise. At 97, she’d eschewed using one until now.     Keeping an appropriate dis

Recently, I opened my Facebook page to find a picture one gentleman had posted of  Ivanka Trump. It showed her as a teenager, her hair a dark brown, and her nose longer than seen in recent photographs. He was suggesting her current face wasn’t her natural one. The jibe saddened me.

“..we just aren’t wholeheartedly connecting with your work, despite its many charms. So, we should step aside.”  An agent sent me this rejection of my memoir recently. To be fair to my manuscript, all the person received was my query. But I won’t quibble.   A compliment is

The day before the coronavirus prompted the library to close at my retirement center, like everyone else, I rushed to the stacks to gather as much reading material as I could carry. My neighbors, being more nimble than I, had left the shelves almost bare by the time I arrived. All tha

The bookstore owner who hosted my summer writers’ workshops closed her doors last December. The rent had ballooned too high, but she hoped to find another location.  Then the pandemic hit in February 2020. Looking back, the woman might have felt she’d had a close call.  Unlike o

“I remind you, your parent isn’t actively dying.” The woman in charge of the assisted living facility where my mother resides spoke crisply as if intending to discourage my request for a visit. I wasn’t discouraged.  By now, I’d lost patience with the medical parsing of wor