You Say You Want a Revolution

I am writing from my childhood bedroom. Some of the books that still line the shelves: The Yearling, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, On the Road, The Tempest, Rabbit Run, Deliverance, The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, The Ox-Bow Incident, Franny and Zooey, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, and Hooray for Yiddish. When cars [...]

STAR

Nation, tonight on The Colbert Report, please check out Neil de Grasse Tyson. Yes, he’s the guy on Nova, the director of the Rose Center and Hayden Planetarium, author of Merlin’s Tour of the Universe, Death by Black Hole, and the Pluto Files among others. He’s the guy who downgraded Pluto’s cold ass from beloved [...]

Another Thing I Really Hate

I know, with the cinematic magic out there like The Hangover, The Proposal, and Year One, it’s no one’s fault but my own that I went to see My Sister’s Keeper. So, I go up to the candy counter and order two small popcorns. The well meaning girl with a jagged part and tilted visor [...]

FAQ: How Do I Know If My Agent Is a Douche?

Amy L. from Los Angeles asks: How do I know if my agent is doing a good job? What can I expect? God did not create all agents equally, and likewise no two clients need exactly the same thing from their agent. So having a good working relationship is as much about the right fit as anything [...]

If I Thought Dreams Could Be Seen, They’d Surely Put My Head In a Guillotine

Just came from my thrice yearly dinner with my oldest publishing friends. Did I say dinner? I meant bloodletting.  I’m talking about the kind of gossip that soothes the soul.  We also talked about a few books: Man Gone Down, Olive Kittredge, Eat Pray Love (her ex-husband just sold his memoir — Starve Sin Hate), Eden’s Outcasts, [...]

Jesus Died For Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine

A writer, we’ll call her Joan, thinks she should wait until her parents are dead to write her memoir. What do I think about that? Well, Joan, you haven’t told me what’s at stake. For instance, an Astor-sized inheritance might be worth putting the prose on hold. I don’t know. It’s a tough question. I do [...]

Cal

Last night, when I was packing up all the poetry, a little piece of paper fluttered out of Anne Sexton’s Live or Die, a book I lived and died by at sixteen. It was a poem cut out of The New Yorker.  It was “For Sheridan” by Robert Lowell. I had no idea who he was at the [...]

Sublime, Meet Ridiculous

Had the great pleasure of seeing Conor Lovett of the Gare St.  Lazare Players  perform Beckett’s First Love. I usually nap for the first twenty minutes of any play, but I was riveted by the performance, the language (omg), and the great themes: love, abandonment, loss, death. Heaven, I was in.     Then, as if [...]

No You Didn’t

Yesterday,  I had lunch with one of the smartest editors in the business. She allowed how she keeps a file for letters from authors that express their gratitude — and that these letters buoy her on particulary rough days. I allowed how I keep an “asshole” file. I started it when I first became an agent, [...]

You Look Like a Monkey, and You Smell Like One, Too

Dearest Darling Readers of this Blog: I have some fantastic news. The Forest for the Trees (that old thing) will be ten next year, and my publisher (oh, with just a smidge of encouragement) has decided to publish a revised edition. A lot has happened in ten years, and yet I’m still the same old fuckwad [...]