How many times have you walked into a room, and gotten sidetracked by a piece of mail and after you opened the mail you realized that you'd forgotten why you came into that room in the first place? You re-trace your steps, hoping to remember what you started out to...

It was a piece in The Guardian that led me to read Lionel Shriver's justly renowned novel The Post-Birthday World. In this richly imagined, cunningly plotted, and brilliantly realized "what-if?" novel, we meet Irina McGovern, a book illustrator pivoting between...

"Feeling so nostalgic for London," said my friend Tai this morning. "It must be the autumnal weather." She and I spent two weeks in England exactly a year ago, hiking through Jane Austen country in beautiful Bath and then sampling the great parks and urban energy of...

It usually begins with something written down longhand. I take it up to my computer, apply a little blind faith and just begin in-putting what's written on the page. Then something clicks and I'm expanding those ideas without actually thinking. Something else has...

  A college birthday party featuring tequila, piñatas and sombreros is branded "an act of ethnic stereotyping." The perpetrators are branded racists, their party deemed an act of "cultural appropriation." Thus begins writer Lionel Shriver's piercing critique in...