Tag: fiction

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • I’M STILL LEARNING

    I’M STILL LEARNING

    I joined the Mah Jongg League last year and there’s still so much to learn. It had been years since I had played, and I was not a very good player when I played years ago.  Many years ago, I played with a group of highly skilled, massively competitive Asian women, and each game went…