When my mother married at 19, dropping out of Erskine College to elope with my six-years-older father, she did not know how to break an egg.

All his life, my father -- very gently -- would tell the story of that first egg, cracked on the side of the stove,...

The story of the Teaneck Sushi Buffet in Bergen County, N.J., is actually more of a cross-cultural love story than a fish tale.

Tommy McGlew, originally of Fort Lee, and his wife, who was born and brought up in the city of Changle, Fujian Province, in southern China, met when...

Michael Mann's 1992 film, "The Last of The Mohicans," despite Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Hawkeye, is deeply flawed. It makes no difference, though: I cannot watch it, especially the last 15 minutes or so, when Chingachgook stands (outrageously, for James Fenimore Cooper fans) atop a mountain in the...

"A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember...

"There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now I, for one, love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV and the...

Dear Coastal America: I'll be back.

If, for all intents and purposes, I appear to have run my course, wiping out the Jersey Shore, Staten Island and what passes for a power grid in benighted, northeastern, Tri-State America, I warn you, appearances can...

"Without power" is such a pregnant phrase, and so monumentally apt for those of us across the northeastern United States who, on the fifth night [at the time of this writing] since Sandy, are still shivering in the dark, many of us still unable to fill up our empty gas...

Naming this storm "Sandy" was morally equivalent to naming the Ebola Virus something like Clementine or Guinevere or Angelina.

I'm quite serious: You do not want to have to say, in years to come, "Sandy took my loved one or my cat or my house or my business back in...

As party-goers, diners, friends, family (and the odd journalist or two) walked towards Pasteles Y Algo Mas, in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, the Puerto Rican DJ was playing musica latina loud enough to move hips four blocks from the restaurant.

My friend Miriam, who just happens to be both a Yogini and a relatively non-observant Jew, called me recently in something of a righteously indignant snit. Because she found me in a similar snit, we proceeded to discuss the ongoing attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East....

In the last century, Andy Warhol said that the era had finally arrived when, thanks to our ravenous and restless communications media, everyone would be "famous" for 15 minutes. In our post-post-Warholian world, that window has, perhaps, telescoped (for most) to the length and breadth of a tweet.

With the...

You "can't hardly find" barbeque in Upstate South Carolina if you're unlucky enough to be visiting the region mid-week. Upstate BBQ eateries are open Thursday through Saturday, customarily; Wednesday through Saturday, if you're lucky.

It was Monday evening, we were in Clemson, where I used to teach journalism. The...

Poet James Dickey, whose poetry student I once was, called my "Up-Country" South (among many other things) "the country of nine-fingered-men."*

In Pickens, the county seat of Upstate South Carolina's eponymous Pickens County, you can still see...

The column "framed" here below was written in Athens, Greece, and first published in September of 1988, in a small, now-defunct, English-language monthly called The Athenian. A longer version was published that same month, in Greek, in an also-now-defunct Greek magazine called Periodiko.

Alone...

So, I always tell people this novel of mine is sub-titled "50 Shades of Shocking Magenta."

Grey, it is not. Hot, it is.

One reviewer, Poor Man, sent in a blurb that read: "The novel came. So did I."

Novelist Mike Keeley was more, um, respectable? "The Visitors' Book moves...

In or around -- who knows, for certain -- the winter of 2008, my lumbar spine separated between L4 and L5... and I went right on practicing level III/IV Iyengar yoga, and teaching, through significant pain, til even I, who had spent over half...

Since the Four Horsemen of My Apocalypse (1. Cheney, and his sock puppet, Bush; 2.The Big Banks; 3. Big Pharma; and 4. America's Military Industrial Complex, for whom even Cheney served as a sock puppet) flushed America's and, very nearly, the planet's economy into...

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." -- Winston Churchill

"Does it really matter what these affectionate people do -- so long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses!" -- Beatrice Campbell

My Facebook profile describes my "belief...

Well, OK: "Great"? I know, I know: my readers, the novel's readers, will be the judge of that, I hear you saying.

But, for me, it had to be that particular "aspirational adjective" because, in my generation of writers, we all saw ourselves writing...

"I don't know if I ever went to sleep or not. The next thing I knew his massive body was on top of mine. In a rough voice he started to repeat my name: 'Leslie. Leslie. Oh, Leslie.' His hands stroked my body in ways that frightened me. It felt...