The two tall men pulled out chairs on either side of me as we sat at the lunch table.  Former colleagues from my political days, Covid had severed our connection three years ago. Now we were reviving the contact.  Happily, both men looked well though one admitted he was struggling w

When Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time  came out several years ago, someone hid money at the back of one copy to see if anyone  got to the end of this complex work on cosmology.  The book hit the best seller list and remained there for 4 years, but no on

Recently, I discovered that on Amazon’s book rankings, the works of John Keats and William Wordsworth are listed 796,426 and 2,337,250 respectively, only slightly higher than mine. (“Counter Culture,” by Caleb Crain, Harper’s, July 2015 pg.82.)  Naturally, I, a modest wr

Winning the Pulitzer Prize won’t ensure a writer respect from a certain cadre of critics, those who owe their high perches to their employment rather than to any literary achievement.   For good or ill, these arbitrators of taste imagine they determine what passes for fine literat