Rose Cantine

I just bought Alice in Wonderland from Vook, a website that sells multimedia books (price: $2.99). When you view a “vook”, you don’t just read text as you would on a Kindle, you get video on the side explaining aspects of the book, the location, the author’s biography, a history of the place. In the [...]

John Cheever is my favorite writer. His short stories are masterpieces. Here is what he says about fiction (from The Paris Review Interviews, Vol III):
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before [...]

It’s summer, the perfect time to embark on a project that will take two months. The idea is to nourish your creative and spiritual life, and integrate it with your physical health, not just this summer but throughout your existence. Here are my top 10 summer projects. I will talk about each one in greater [...]

I am reading “Julian” by Gore Vidal about the Roman emperor Julian (known by many as Julian the Apostate) who lived between 331 and 363 AD. Although it is a work of historical fiction, Vidal had meticulously researched his subject matter (unlike many writers today who play fast and loose with history). The novel is [...]

The Bible of American grammar and style, Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, has come under attack on its 50th anniversary. Geoffrey Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, says:
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice [...]

I wrote this poem on a Virgin America flight from San Francisco to Washington DC. It’s not Wordsworth, but I thought I’d take a stab at celebrating National Poetry Month with some verse.
The ATM
A woman pulls cash out of a wall
The sirens scream as the heavens fall
Helicopter Ben drops money from the sky
Far away in [...]

Larry McMurtry, a well-known American writer, says that the book is one of many endangered species:
The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40. I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think [...]

While banks continue getting bailout money to cover up the losses incurred by their incompetent CEOs, who it appears, have been lavishing funds on redecorating their offices, a UK member of parliament has asked the government to help small independent bookstores:
Kaydee Bookshop in Clitheroe, Lancashire, which was named independent bookseller of the year in 1992, [...]

Barry Ritholtz, who runs the excellent financial blog, The Big Picture, writes:
We were combining a business trip to California (Santa Rosa, North of San Francisco) with a pleasure trip thru the vineyards of Sonoma and Napa. The onboard movie was Sideways. Then came the line — F%&king Merlot! — that sent Merlot sales down [...]