Time stops when you are writing a book, at least when I am. Only one day counts, looms and threatens and that is the day the manuscript must be delivered. There is no present, but only getting ahead, progress, limping along to the next page and the next. This is...

The day started out beautifully. Crisp, cool and clear. Halloween, but not a witch or a goblin in sight.

I got to the studio, where I was to be on NPR last Monday, a little bit early. Then again, I had waited my whole life to write a book...

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Said Samuel Johnson. My father, the author Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, which turns 50 years old today, was tired of neither.

He died in 1999, at the age of seventy-six. To say that he was a...

On Tuesday, October 10, 1961, I got up as usual, went to public school, came home with a swollen jaw after being punched by a school bully (a not uncommon occurrence), came home, sat down in the kitchen with my brother, had a snack and we did our homework. Unbeknownst...

My father, Joseph Heller, had literary and artistic friends. But Joe's crowd was not, shall we say, exactly Gertrude Stein's Parisian Salon, either in real life or as recreated recently by Woody Allen in his dreamy cinematic bonbon Midnight in Paris. Nor was it The Algonquin Roundtable, the literary lunch...

Happy New Year and L'shanah tovah to all my Jewish friends, family, enemies, acquaintances and as yet unmet creatures, but mea culpa, I actually had to look up that phrase on Google to get it right. (Googlestein?) Somehow, I always thought it was the name of a film I have...

I prepared for my book reading last week at the Corner Bookstore, on 93rd Street and Madison Avenue, (my first reading, ever), the way I prepare for most new life experiences: I broke out in hives, didn't sleep for a week, misplaced the mascara, was limned in a perpetual clammy...

In 1962, as Catch-22 began to gain a bit of commercial traction the year after publication, my parents began going out quite often together at night. The job of taking care of me and my brother (then aged 10 and 6) in the evenings shifted increasingly to my grandparents on...

Why on earth would anyone want to be famous? This is a question I have pondered often during my adult life. Although I've certainly not faced the dilemma firsthand, I did have a chance to witness the next best thing, growing up and seeing the spectacular transformation of my father,...

At a collapsed San Jose gold and copper mine, an agonizing wait of 69 days is finally coming to an end for 33 entombed miners and their loved ones. It's almost impossible to imagine it but the colossal cave-in sealed them off way back on Aug. 5. Predictably, there was...

Nobody danced better. His music was the best, once upon a time. Okay. But all right, already. "Thriller" is not thrilling when you have just heard it, without ever even intending to, 2,345,789 times in a row.

Enough is enough. We have all read and read about his hideous...

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

Just take a look at the latest comeback kid, the pride of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, 10 year-old Stump, the Sussex spaniel.

Sassy and sleek, mighty geezer Stump essentially retired from show business four years ago, but still...

We all have one. (Well, at least one.)

The relative who makes you and your whole family cringe every time he opens his mouth at family gatherings. He's the reason why you'd be too mortified to invite your boyfriends, your pals and work colleagues to these occasions. Every year you...

Jesus, this is a tough crowd.

What's with everyone dissing the hat?

Why didn't anyone find it aesthetically logical? And in any case, who cares?

Whatever happened to personal style? Must we all look the same? Aretha's got gravitas and the cojones to take a risk. She's Aretha, for...

It's getting harder these days to be cranky, to stay curmudgeonly.

It can still be done, of course, it's just that right now, it requires much more of an effort than usual. And curmudgeons resent that, in fact, that's an integral part of being a curmudgeon.

But really, who...

"Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me," says Sarah Appalling. Is she channeling Spiro Agnew? Or trying to? That's some goal.

Remember Agnew's narcissistic and paranoid ravings? When this bilious Blagojevich predecessor attacked the media, as crooked and vile as he was, at least his gems were often...

These days, I feel caught in the strangest kind of limbo, suspended somewhere between euphoria and the most utter, bleak despair, and in speaking to the other people around me and even in hearing from friends all over the world, I know I am not alone. Everyone feels irritatingly and...

Like almost anyone else I've ever met in my life, right now I need a job. And when I read the other day that employees of "disgraced billionaire" Bernard Madoff are still showing up to work, doing nothing there and still being paid while "expecting to be fired," I thought...

Can this year end soon enough?

Not for me. But for the miracle of the Obama election (and I am still pinching myself thrice daily), most of the news has seemed dumb and dumber, glum and glummer.

In the meantime, the governor of Illinois pitches forward, more arrogantly than...

Everything is shrinking these days, worth less, diminished. A million bucks used to be worth, well, a million bucks. Today we pay more and get less. We live larger but feel smaller. We must face facts, my friends: Less is less.

Now, with belts tightened and the notion of a...