Essays on my Substack, The New Old School:
“Fiona, Rosie, Shirley & Me: On Chicks, Cars, Motorcycles & Machines”
“My Bread & Butter: On the Complexity of Carbs”
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“A Year in Reading: Romance” — essay published at The Millions, December 2020
“Pandemic Life By the Numbers: The Golden Five” — essay published at The Millions and Bloom, December 2020
Minorities in Publishing Episode 88 — audio conversation with Jenn Baker at MiP, June 2019
“Feelin’ Good: What GREEN BOOK Got Wrong and PERIOD Gets Right” — essay published at The Millions, April 2019
“Better Late Than Never: On Blooming as a Reader” — essay published at The Millions, January 2017
“My Pleasure” — essay published at Buzzfeed, October 2016
“Agnes Martin’s Perfection: Now and Not Yet” — essay published at The Millions, 2015.
“Mourning, Meaning, and Moving On: Life After Mad Men“— essay published at The Millions, 2015.
“Small Victories, Large Discoveries: On Fishes, Ponds, and Finding Open Spaces” — essay published at Bloom, 2015.
“We Know Less Than We Think We Do: Why David Brooks is Not a Pariah But a Harbinger of Hope”(on Brooks’s column about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me) — essay published at The Millions, 2015.
“Experience Required: The Real F-Word” — essay published at Bloom, April 2013
“Getting It Right” — short essay published in The Threepenny Review, 1999, and anthologized in Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, ed. Alan Ziegler.
“On Loneliness: Art, Life, and Fucking Human Beings” — essay published at The Millions, 2012.
“Living & Learning at Bookstores” – short memoir published at Tin House‘s blog, Jan 2012.
“In the Corporeal Age We Will Know the Names of Trees“ – essay published in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, eds. Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee, 2011.
“In the Light Where Art & Longing Meet: My Day With James Salter” – essay published at Tin House magazine, winter 2011.
“On Spinach and the National Book Awards” — essay published at The Millions, 2011.
“Scared Straight: Writers and the New Happiness” — essay published at The Millions, 2011.
“Post-40 Bloomers: Late According to Whom?” — intro to monthly feature at The Millions, 2011.
“It’s Not You, It’s Me: Breaking Up With Books” — essay published at The Millions, 2010.
“The Mommy Problem” — essay published at The Millions, 2010.
“Sex, Seriously: James Salter Trumps the Great Male Novelists“ — essay published at The Millions, 2010.
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Designing a Book Jacket” — essay published at The Millions, 2009.
“Lovely Leo” — short story published in Crab Orchard Review, 2002.
“Like Love” — short story published in Sonora Review, 2001.
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I am a regular contributor to The Millions. Click here for all my essays and reviews there since July 2009.