Most of the reviews for The Magician's Book came in before Christmas -- editors quite reasonably saw it as a holiday title. But a few more have trickled in: "In this powerful meditation on 'the schism between childhood and adult...

Here are a couple of interviews I've done recently for The Magician's Book. First, there's a segment from the great public radio program "To The Best of Our Knowledge," in this episode on "magical thinking." Steve Poulson, who does most...

The National Book Critics Circle, of which I am a member, does an interesting occasional feature that asks a critic to list five essential titles for any critic's shelf. I did one recently, and it is here. In the entry,...

I’ve been remiss on the housekeeping for the site, so things have piled up. Here are a whole bunch of links to reviews and other press items about The Magician’s Book. “A recent request asked me which book I wished...

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I’ve just finished reading Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a novel I’ve been curious about since reading his An American Tragedy over 10 years ago. I’d somehow acquired the idea that Sister Carrie was the story of a climbing femme fatale,...

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I knew from the moment I first saw the preliminary sketches for the cover illustration for The Magician’s Book that I was a very lucky author. The artwork is both beautiful and perfectly suited to the book itself: a mixture...

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Here's this weekend's crop of reviews: Gregory Maguire, in the New York Times Book Review: "A welcome bit of magic: part reader’s log, part biography, part literary criticism... Miller has learned much from Lewis, not least a bracingly colloquial, honest,...

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A little essay I wrote on the connections and similarities between Narnia and Christmas runs on the op-ed page of the New York Times today. It's meant to be a low-key counter to the whole War on Christmas palaver and...

Desmond and Nini have gotten to the point where you can’t always be sure which cultural symbols they understand. It makes conversations with them weirdly disorienting. I might need to explain that a crate with a red cross painted on...

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There are three new and very gratifying reviews of The Magician’s Book in Sunday papers today. Michael Joseph Gross calls it “easily the best book ever written about Lewis†in the Los Angeles Times. In the Washington Post, Elizabeth Ward...

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There's a lovely review of The Magician's Book in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, by Meghan Cox Gurdon, and they're running an excerpt on their web site. Salon has a different excerpt (an adaptation of the chapter on why...

Here is an essay I wrote for the back page of this Sunday's New York Times Book Review about the thorny matter of deciding which books to get rid of when you need to clear some space on your shelves...

We're holding a photo contest inviting people to send in pictures they've taken of Narnia-like places. Here's the Flickr page and a description. Have you ever seen a place -- a snowy wood, a green field, a seaside castle --...

At one point in Don Quixote the knight takes it into his head to imitate his great role model, Amadis of Gaul, who, in disfavor with his lady love, goes mad and wanders through the wilderness in rags. Don Quixote...

Then came October full of merry Glee For yet his Noul was totty of the Must, Which he was treading in the Wine-fats see, And of the joyous Oil, whose gentle Gust Made him so frolick and so full of...

My neighborhood is suddenly full of high-end ice cream shops, and I love ice cream. More often than not, though, I walk out the door sans cup or cone after surveying the selection. I like ice cream with nuts, and, furthermore, as far as I'm concerned a brownie without… Read full post »

Recently, I've noticed that the characters in literary novels, especially books by young writers, are just too *sad*. A pair of books by a married couple, Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and Nicole Krauss' "A History of Love" are prime examples. The characters have suff… Read full post »

There's a kind of imported cookie I love, very thin, crisp wafers with sliced almonds embedded in them, made with real butter. Supplies seem to be erratic, however, and even when they're in stock, they're kinda expensive (like all good cookies). Then I found a recipe in a magazine,… Read full post »

I was pretty excited to get a copy of MacSpeech Dictate last week. This is a new Mac voice recognition program that uses the same engine as the Windows program Dragon NaturallySpeaking. DNS is so superior to any previous Mac voice rec that I went to the trouble of… Read full post »

The universal, or approximately universal, opinion in these days is that the unpardonable sin is to be a bore.  This is a profound error.  If this awful phraseology is to be used at all, it may be safely said that the unpardonable sin is being bored. 

 

-- G.K.… Read full post »

I just found out that the guy painting my apartment testified against Leona Helmsley during her trial for tax evasion in 1989. He was (very) uncharacteristically laconic on the subject of working for her. "That lady had a lot of problems," he said.

There are only two things that will make TV worth watching this April, at least as far as I'm concerned: the beginning of the last pod of Season 4 episodes of Lost, and -- above all -- the return of Battlestar Galactica. It's still unclear whether BSG will get… Read full post »

I refuse to predict! I'm tired of the raging popular obsession with how series should end; the frenzy over "The Sopranos" was the last straw. 

One thing I really like about "The Wire" is its unpredictability. OK, it was obvious Omar had to go down, if only because Simon… Read full post »

  

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Ingredients:   ◠two handfuls Broccoli florets  ◠2 oz. dried linguine  ◠1 garlic cloves, minced   ◠2 tbsp. parmesan cheese, grated   ◠olive oil  ◠1 Red bell pepper  ◠20 Nicoise olives, pitted and chopped   ◠1 tsp. lemon juice
Directions:
Halve and roast pepper…

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