Reader Writers' Faves Worn, Solid, Absolute — Mary Lang Staying Power — Paul Krueger Babbittry — Joe Daley Hillerman’s Climb — Colin Flaherty Macabre Reminder — Ray Westberg My Adult Card — Eleanor Widmer Not …

I have stretched out on the couch — a plumpish well-lit haven upholstered with rough, nubby cotton, ivory in color. In the kitchen the man I love shuts and opens and shuts the oven door. …

They said you might get out. You had a chance. Out of this hellhole. There's a secret. It's a game. That's what you think. Books. Salvation. To know is to be able. You start with …

College professors strain to convince novitiates that the boring "masterpieces" of Western literature (Hemingway, Melville, James, etc.) deserve their reputations solely from the "test-of-time" standard. But I, for one, do not believe any worthwhile art …

James Lee Burke is one of those writers who has been quietly toiling in the vineyard (or cotton fields, he might say) for decades, producing first-class work that has remained invisible to the bookbuying public …

Once upon a time, I was a non-hippie proto-post-punk semi-amniotic undergraduate at UCSD, floundering in the concrete-and-topsoil wastes of an almost brand-new Muir College—searching for a major, a mentor, or something magic (not to mention …

Dear ...I'm sure you've got snow, that your fireplace warms the living room. You can bet it's 70 here. I've just turned on the furnace for the first time, but even so, only after the …

All right, let's see if I can do this in one sitting, no leaving the typer, a thousand words on Faulkner, should be a snap. Faulkner, wait, Hemingway. Why does (or did) anybody, even as …

There are those authors who mean a lot to me because of how much they mean. I mean, how much they represent, signify, stand for, as separate from what they wrote. And they go on …

I know a written work whose scope and purpose are unsurpassed by any other in the English-speaking world. Moreover, I know of no other that can match its paradoxical ability to arouse, equally, both hope …

All the usual suspects: the Bard, Chekjov, Emilk D., Villon, whoever wrote the Book of Job—ditto the Book of Love. But instead of playing favorites, I'd much rather plug a few texts that knocked me …

I read my first novel at the age of seven, after which the printed word became my obsession. In the ghetto where we lived, the public library was endowed by Andrew Carnegie; to get to …

Lucid rays beaming down pencil thin through holes in the canvas, pierce the dim and give to the dead air an aura of nebulous presence — a macabre reminder, or perhaps visitation, by disembodied spirit. …

My buddy Fred has been reading A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez for more than a year. But every time he picks it up, he falls asleep. "That's a great book," he …

Thirteen years ago, while a freshman at a small private college in Florida, I picked up Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. An amusing, often vicious satire of mindless conformity and middle-class morals, Babbitt plucked a chord in …

Newspapers - five of them each day — have consumed my reading hours for the past decade. That leaves little time for books, which often sit in stacks on my bedroom dresser, unopened, until they're …

I admit this wincing: For a time I was one of those little girls who lives for horses. Since living was for me largely a matter of reading, the obsession took the form of reading …

“Yes. I remember the case,’’ the doctor said. “It was a home birth, with, I believe, a midwife. We could have saved the child, had it been born in the hospital or treated right away."

Her name was Jessica. Chubby arms and thighs, the skin electric with the immense energy of growth. No obvious illness, no dehydration or apparent pain here. Chewing on the stethoscope tube. “What’s wrong?” I asked.