"Sometimes it's a challenge not to be too precious about your own ideas. Working with editors and art directors makes the process more of a group effort—you’re working towards a harmonious whole."

I’m stalking Philip Roth. OK, maybe stalking overstates it—I haven’t crosshaired him through a scope—but I’m definitely creeping and staring, prowling like a borderline case with a hunting wound. Since I spotted America’s Greatest Living ex-Novelist crossing Seventy-Ninth Street, I’ve been bloodhounding him around the Upper West Side.

I have been online, in one way or another, since the early 1990s. In the early days, I was on a desktop computer, a Macintosh LC II, with a very slow modem.

Until his death on January 27, 2010, J. D. Salinger was famously a recluse. Once a darling of the New York literary scene, he had published nothing since 1965, though there were rumors that he wrote every day.

In March, I reviewed William Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842, for The Christian Science Monitor. Though I knew little about colonial Afghanistan, I didn’t hesitate to take the assignment.

Who doesn’t like to eavesdrop? Riding the subway, standing in line at the bank, sitting at a restaurant table conveniently close to another table—all of these provide opportunities to drop in on a stranger’s life. And as often as not, how people talk is as interesting as what they are saying.Reading

What you put in. What you leave out. It all comes down to this—and the leaving out is the hardest part, the heart of the art that is memoir. Autobiography is what happened first, what happened next, what happened then; it is bricks and mortar.

Summer didn’t let us down easy this year. By the time October was turning orange, the island had already been through sickness, betrayal, abandonment, dementia, and a couple of deaths. Some losses are expected, the inevitable bereavements we steel ourselves for: The elderly man who took leave of his mind and then, a few months later, his body.

"When you watch a man on the tracks before an oncoming train, that’s exactly what you do: watch."

Fifteen years ago, I went to a Christmas Eve party that ended early. A couple of guys invited me to the only tavern open in Iowa City, and I joined them.