Neo Nostalgia

I was sixteen and had just finished reading Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives in rapid succession. My literary ambitions outweighed any talent I thought I possessed: I intended to be crowned the new king of horror, and my novel (the title of which I’ve since forgotten)–amounting to nothing more than Rosemary’s Baby-meets-The Stepford Wives–was going to win me a legion of followers and make Stephen King shit his pants. Read more »

At the office, where I’m probably the only eligible bachelor, and where the lady of the moment is Amy, because of her very recent engagement to her live-in boyfriend, I’m often asked when I’m going to get married. My response, invariably, is, "If I’m lucky? Never." Read more »

I’m glad, though not particularly surprised, to see my own nominations–Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder–as two of this year’s contestants. Get reading, kids. Read more »

I’ve been doing a good job of not buying any new books until I’ve read (almost) everything in the fabled to-be-read stack. (Confession: I bought, read, and enjoyed Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies last week.) Read more »

In real life, I only have one friend who’s truly literary–which is to say, she doesn’t read the kinds of books you’d normally see on the New York Times bestseller list or as an Oprah recommendation. Read more »

I turned and saw Nadia leaning against her desk, flipping through a magazine and looking completely bored. Work that day was slow and, like the employees in Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, we needed something to do. We were ready to start begging for more work. Read more »

If memory serves, I was in tenth grade when I was introduced to the William Shakespeare authorship debate. Read more »

I work with a woman whom I refer to as the Creepy Cat Lady. She often wears a baseball cap and an oversized tee shirt to the office, and has a loud, buzzing voice, like that of a hyena. She seems like a nice lady, despite her eccentricities. Read more »

Finnegan’s Wank (no, the apostrophe isn’t a typo) is pretty amusing, though I’m partial to P. William Grimm’s hilarious Finnegan-as-Dubliner moneyshot: Read more »