Magnificent Octopus

"Brilliance is rooted in a knowledge that is known to many, which a brilliant mind extends beyond the usual to new revelations." ...

It is the café of lost youth not in the sense that I'm older now and I've lost my youth, nor that I lost my youth too by growing up ...

I love wine. I love drinking wine almost as much as I love reading books. Sometimes more. Of course, I often do both at the same time. One...

They said I was clever. I see now they meant that I was bookish, and suited to becoming a learned woman. A learned woman is a very differe...

Yes, that bookstore wasn't only a refuge; it was also a step in my life. I would often stay there until closing time. There was a chair ...

It's a relaxed morning, the kid's away, and I'm feeling good. Heading to work in my Gucci sunglasses. The scarf I got at a Paris...

My sense of humour may be broken. Or maybe sex offenders just aren't that funny. He has made mistakes. Baldy Conscience was a terrific...

"Do you know what steals your memories?" I look at him. Because it is a strange question, one that has no answer and many answer...

I recently convinced several people to read Valera Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth , not by describing the main character or his story ...

I think about memory and what it is. Keep your memories close , people say. Say it to children as often as they can. Keep them schooled up i...

I went to a wedding a long time ago, the wedding of close friends (where, coincidentally, I met my then future but now ex-partner), which ma...

And they went on staring at him, examining this fat man who was too hot and had landed in their bar like a bumblebee in a glass of beer. Tha...

"You're interested in time?" "Complexity and simplicity," he replied. "Time was simple, is simple. We can div...

After all, as Quintilian says, a hyperbolic is simply "a fissure in the relationship between style and reality." I'd heard qui...

A friend brought to my attention this wonderful "essay" by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker, The Only Thing I Envy Men . I write ...

It's one of my favourite times of year again: The Blue Metropolis Literary Festival is just a couple weeks away, April 11–17, heralding...

Boredom drove him to read the folder of hotel information from cover to cover, the fire escape plans on the back of the door, a copy of York...

I'd been copyediting for a few years when I landed a dream job, at a very hip ad agency. Designers and copywriters were clamoring to wor...

Here's a book that I wouldn't ordinarily read, that I had no desire to read, that I had no intention of reading. Not my kind of book...

"I'm dead, but I'm fine." Dead inside, she means. Or maybe just dead to some people in particular. I found The Lost Daug...