The Washington Post recently asked several authors which fictional characters would make the best beach buddies. Here are some of my favorite responses: After some vacillating, Christopher Buckley decides: “I think I’ll go with Magwitch, the escaped convict from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. He’d have some fantastic stories to tell, and, as we know, he [...]

After living in Boston for nearly three years, I finally got around to getting a library card this winter. Why did I wait so long? I was busy with school and work, yes, but mostly I was just lazy. Also, there’s my small problem of book hoarding. In my mind, borrowing books from the library [...]

Sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong. Wednesday, May 6, Everybody Wins Metro Boston is hosting a fundraiser to benefit the literacy program. I’ve been volunteering as part of their Power Lunch program since last fall, traveling to a South Boston elementary school once a week during my lunch break to read to William, [...]

Bibliophilia is defined as a love of books, while bibliomania is an actual disorder, where the victim compulsively hoards books to the detriment of social relationships and their own wellbeing. Many of us lifelong lovers of books struggle with the fine line that separates the philia from the mania. I got into a conversation at [...]

I returned from my second AWP conference exhausted, laden with lit journals and assorted swag, and feeling a mixture of inspiration and disappointment. I promptly took a long nap, and only after I woke up the next morning was I able to properly begin processing the 4-day hurricane known as AWP. This is not to [...]

One of my favorite things about living in Brookline is being just down the street from Brookline Booksmith, one of Boston’s best independent booksellers. In fact, Boston Magazine named it THE best in Boston seven years of the past nine, most recently this year. Located just a moment’s walk from the Coolidge Corner T stop [...]

The last weeks of any given year bring a few things that rarely change: the scramble to have something to do on New Year’s Eve that doesn’t suck, making resolutions, and frenetically reliving the past year with every kind of countdown possible. It seems that everywhere you look, there’s a new “best of” list to [...]

With little more than two weeks remaining until New Year’s Eve, many of us have already started to think about those nagging little reminders of just how much we suck at life–that’s right, it’s New Year’s resolutions time! With the close of each year, it’s been my own personal ritual to dig out my notebook [...]

The holiday season is officially upon us. If you’re anything like me, you wait until the last possible minute to buy gifts for those on your “nice” list. Also like me, you’ve probably discovered that the quality of the gift is often inversely proportional to the amount of time before said holiday (yeah, I’m looking [...]

As writers, we’re all well-versed in that dreaded malady–no, not the flu: I’m talking about writer’s block. There’s nothing worse than the bright white of an empty page, or the taunting wink of the cursor on the blank computer screen. Thankfully, The Den of Geek blog has compiled a list of the Top 5 Writer’s [...]