I was a skittish kid, even a bit of a fearful kid. The mere idea of engaging with something scary — a book, a movie, or a television show squarely in the horror genre — made me preemptively woozy. Once I did finally engaged with such material, though (beginning, of course, with Stephen King), I spent a few years pursuing ever more spins into the darkness. For the most part, I stick with any given author for only a single tome. While the form doesn’t deserve the disdain often heaped on it, accomplished literary figures writing such novels were a … Continue reading My Writers: John Skipp & Craig Spector

Back in the rough and tumble days before the vast digital landscape was scored with roadways to full archives of certain publications, I used to devote thought and energy to tearing pages out of magazine. Our filing cabinet had a folder stuffed full of articles either I or my partner-in-all-things found interesting enough that we wanted the option of revisiting them somewhere down the line. A sizable number of these came from The New Yorker. These weren’t yanked indiscriminately, but nor we we making a concerted effort to assemble the work of certain writers. I wasn’t even looking at the byline … Continue reading My Writers: Malcolm Gladwell

Let’s be real. When I return to this recurring feature, plucking a new author from the misty library of the already read that resides in my brain, I usually opt for a wordsmith who will confer some amount of coolness on me, in much the same way that the tomes that speak well of the reader usually have conspicuous placement on the household’s most prominent bookshelf. (For years, Richard Ben Cramer’s massive What It Takes was front and center in my collection, despite the inconvenient detail that I only made through about a third of its thousand-plus pages.) But I … Continue reading My Writers: John Grisham

As soon as I was finished with Fast Food Nation I wanted to pass along the book to everyone I knew. And give them a chance to pass it along to everyone they knew. For a time, I even had a plan in place to do just that. The household paperback copy was handed out with the instruction to lendees to print their names on the inside front cover once they’d completed it and then to pass it along to another person they thought would benefit from the information within its pages. I had visions of highly weathered copy of the … Continue reading My Writers: Eric Schlosser

Like a lot of people, I suppose, my introduction to Oliver Sacks came through the movie Awakenings. Based on the nonfiction account of the same name, written by Sacks, the film depicted the efforts of a physician to treat catatonic patients in a Bronx hospital, bringing a heightened empathy and commitment to exploring possible solutions to a group of people who had been largely disregarded by other doctors, relegated to the category of the untreatable. The doctor finds success in a treatment, although it is tragically fleeting. In the film, Sacks is renamed Dr. Malcolm Sayer and played by Robin … Continue reading My Writers: Oliver Sacks