This post originally appeared in the internet literary journal Numero Cinq

Salesmen Wanted

It was July, 1971 and Manhattan was molten in the summer heat. The air wavered over the softening asphalt and walking the furnace streets I felt like I’d been dipped… Read full post »

             Back at the house, Julia turned to him as he came in. “You have the oddest book collection I’ve ever seen.”

“But I’ve read them all. That’s the difference.”

“You have Proust -- &rdq… Read full post »

 Harlan Mallory stood at the podium, upstairs in the great Hall at the Nantucket Atheneum, talking about his Viet Nam paintings and wondering how he had won this dreary trifeca of social obligations: visitors down from the city, an evening spent with the relentless Julia Copenhaver, an… Read full post »

 I just feel like a total failure, okay?

I had so much potential, that’s what everyone was saying, how much potential I had. I envy old people, no tells them about their potential, they don’t have to disappoint anyone. I started out… Read full post »

It’s a common story: lovely small town or coastal community (Nantucket is both), languishes for years as the slightly seedy refuge for old money and new hippies, until the new rich people discover it, and start turning it into a warped version of their own gated communities… Read full post »

I had a lively a post-mortem conversation about Game of Thrones, the recently concluded HBO mini-series, over dinner with my friend Neil last night. Afterward I thought about  a meeting I took at a Hollywood studio many years ago. They were looking for someone to adap… Read full post »

 So Peter Falk died last week, and someone posted the 41-year old video of his appearance on the Dick Cavett Show  with John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara. It was exhilarating to watch, but also sad and profoundly disturbing -- a time-capsule message from another era, or p… Read full post »

 Thomas Perry

The Informant, Thomas Perry’s  nineteenth novel, was published last week. It’s an appropriate occasion to step back and take a look at this extraordinary, underrated author’s body of work.  His first novel, The Butcher… Read full post »

A small mercenary army of  writing instructors have been making a good living for decades now, dispensing advice to hopeful neophytes, creating systems and structures, plans and pie charts, creating a step-by-step creativity that reduces a novel or screenplay to… Read full post »

The Republicans have all the good catch phrases.

But one of the most revealing aspects of our new political "discourse" is that they have moved so far to the right that Democrats can now use their old catch-phrases against them. It was George H.W. Bush who coined… Read full post »

I closed my mother's diary. The train was pulling into the Fourteenth Street station, six stops beyond the one I wanted. I jumped up, stuffing the notebook back into my pocket, shoved my way to the door and out onto the platform. I pulled out my cell to… Read full post »

It’s the big Tuesday afternoon acquisitions meeting, and the whole editorial department, editors and junior editors, have gathered around the big conference table to try and convince the Sales and Publicity department to buy Turns in the Wauwinet Road, a new novel by Desmond Harris, w… Read full post »

Don't worry!

It's the power of sicial media we're testing here, not you or any individual person. My little game concerns our collective power only! I entered the Numero Cinq aphorism contest and the rules stipulate that anyone can vote. Numero Cinq is my other… Read full post »

The critical consensus on the Todd Haynes Mildred Pierce HBO miniseries that began on Sunday night (and continues for the next two weeks) is that it’s slow and plodding and unimaginatively faithful to a corny and old fashioned book. The critics unanimously prefer the 1945… Read full post »

American Idol suffers from too much,  too many and too long, these days: too much bad singing, too many bad songs. And too many pitch problems, which is bizarre in a group picked from hundreds of thousands of aspiring singers. I’ll be glad when the lame and the… Read full post »

Harlan was waiting at the light on Lexington Avenue when it struck him that walking away from a meeting with his son was weak and childish. As usual he was doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and he was too stubborn to course-correct. They needed to talk and… Read full post »

March is Hate Month on Nantucket – miserable weather and cranky people and not enough money and too much to do.  

That’s fine with me. I hate everything these days. I’ve become a hater. Hate is the new love. Hate is the new… Read full post »

Harlan Mallory unfolded himself out of the cab in front of Barudsky Gallery, feeling like a hick. An old hick: his bad knee was acting up and compensating for it, he had pulled his back out. He was stiff and cranky. The… Read full post »

I dreamed about them

All my life:

Obliterating walls of green water

Rising from the dry sucking tide

Looming like cliffs

Blocking the sun.

But of course, I’d never seen one.

No one had, and lived to describe… Read full post »

It was a long slog tonight on the 'big stage', with good singers choosing bad songs and bad singers making random noise that involved dramatic runs, emotive squinting and trite gestures. The gap is widening between the talented singers and the stage weight.

The nadir of the… Read full post »

It seems like a trivial matter, but the Weather Channel has changed it’s format: “Local on the Eights”, at least in my locality, has become “National on the Eights” with high tech graphics, glittery rhomboid flip screens, statistics about every cit… Read full post »

It’s great for  Robbie Rosen and Thia Megia and Stefano Langone and most of the other top 24 contestants on American Idol this season that the judges are so cuddly and generous and nice. It’s good for their parents, who must be so proud! It’s good for their home… Read full post »

I dreamed I was reading a book last night.

I mean, an actual book, with creamy linen pages and some gorgeous type-face (not a font!) -- Century Schoolbook? Garamond? -- inked deeply into the grain. The cracked leather cover and the silk endpapers made me think of… Read full post »

This autobiographical slide show first appeared on Douglas Glover's website Numero Cinq

Dog Days

For years I wanted a dog desperately. Wandering the stacks of the New York Society Library on 79^th street, I discovered the works of Albert Payson Terhune, and with… Read full post »

This morning in The New York Times, I read that a Connecticut high school's production of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone may be cncelled because the characters use the "N" word. This comes directly on the heels of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn, which changes… Read full post »