Tag: books
-
Dangerous Liaisons
I taught the novel Dangerous Liaisons for many years with great success, and I watched the movie version with my undergrads in class. In their final essays, they told me, in ingenious ways, why the book’s topic, cruelty, had to be well written with care, and how setting the novel in a different time period worked…
-
UR TEXT
To say that this book saved me is an understatement. I’m not getting schmaltzy on you, but yes, like other parents way back then, when the Encyclopedia Britannica was the flavor of the year, many parents bought a set. Mine did. But when some other guy pressed our doorbell years later, and my father and…
-
DAVID DUCHOVNY AND ELIZABETH GILBERT
Actor David Duchovny recently told someone I admire that poetry is useless but necessary. Zzzzzz. Do a Google search. Like many of his comments, Duchovny is not the first person to use this analogy, a clunky way of saying that he’s so much deeper than other people. How quickly celebrities rise in the book publishing…
-
The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau
I’m re-reading this seminal book for the millionth time, a refresher course of what I have to offer. My favorite quote? If you make your business about helping others, you‘ll always have plenty of work. –Chris Guillebeau My husband and I interviewed Chris when we lived in New York, and we found him passionate and…
-
KEEPING HANDS BUSY, BRAIN BUSY
I am late to the world of knitting and crocheting. After reading Sutton Foster’s memoir, “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life,” a few months back, I found a beautifully written, moving backstory of a traumatized childhood. The Audible version is narrated by her. Foster makes crochet and knitting into art, and she uses it to…
-
WRITING WILL SAVE YOU
Imagine my surprise when I attended a workshop billed as WRITER TO AGENT, with the promise that agents read your five page submission, but when the “Ask An Agent Anything” rolled around, one agent in particular told everyone that he preferred submissions that came from a referral, because that writer has put their entire faith in…
-
AXES AND MURDERERS
The first time we lived in Manhattan, my husband and I made friends with an elderly gentleman who told everyone he was looking out for us. When we first moved to NYC, a friend of a friend told us we should meet Bennie and scribbled his telephone number on a card with his name. “Don’t…
-
THE DEVIL’S IN THE DETAILS
The news is filled with gossip on the impending Bezos and Sanchez wedding. I am reminded that in the mid 2000s, a friend was contracted to write a book about the starter marriage trend. Every time we talked, she would tell me how the interviews were going. Thousands of men and women volunteered for the…
-
Getting Back at People or Solving a Problem to Make the World a Better Place: Empathy
My husband and I have a problem where we live: our accents. We can’t hide the fact that we are from the North. We have another problem: unlike most of the other residents in North Carolina, we are bleeding-heart liberal Democrats. In a town as small as ours, as soon as Trump was re-elected, we…
-
POOP MACHINES
This morning, my beloved husband passed his gastroenterology procedure with flying colors. He is good for another ten years, in theory. We live in a small community, and it took all of fourteen minutes to drive from our home and walk through the lobby doors of our hospital this morning. Our hospital is a modern…
Mary Louise Penaz 