Lev Raphael

Wait, you guys have Sunday on Saturday? Isn't that confusing?

He's your type, he looks Jewish.

So he tried to Jew me down. Oops. No offense.

Is that really your own nose?

I can't help it, Jews are damned to hell. That's what my pastor said. But we can still...

She retired this week after forty years, the teacher who changed my life.

I had dreamed of being a writer since I was in second grade, but it wasn't until I took my first class with Kristin Lauer at Fordham University that I fell in love with writing itself.

She...

Have you been published?

What do you write? Oh.

Do you have, like, a real job?

I don't read much.

Do you know Stephen King? What's he like?

You should write a book about my life, it's a bestseller for sure.

I'm gonna write someday, when I have free...

That's not exactly what prize-winning author Loren D. Estleman recently said at a Michigan writer's conference, but it's close.

The problem with even using the term, he said, is that it's a supremely unhelpful way of saying something very basic and ordinary: you're stuck.

I...

A novelist friend laughingly told me about getting lost a while back while reading -- but not lost in the book. Lost outside of it. She found a reference to the Seven Years' War and because she wasn't sure what that conflict was (it pitted most of Europe's major powers...

I write an academic mystery series and because other books of mine have been taught around the country, I've done a lot of readings and talks at universities in the U.S. and even abroad. At almost every school I've visited, Ivy League or community college, someone tells me about a...

Blogger Jeff Goins says that modern writers should follow the example of The Hunger Games if they want to be successful.

What does that mean? Writers should write for a young, easily distracted audience, which means "short novels, in large fonts, with quick chapters." Sentences should be...

Back in my public junior high school choir, one of the songs even us snarky kids loved was an adaptation of Psalm 100. It was really rousing, and decades later I can still remember how much fun it was to not only sing "Make a joyful noise" but to also...

The New York Times recently ran a discussion about author blurbs. Begging for blurbs is one of the more misery-producing aspects of being published.

It can leave us desperate and depressed. It's humiliating to have grovel for blurbs, rather than have your publisher secure them for you. You...

I recently heard a writer who teaches at a Midwest college talk about the brave new world of publishing. Since her last book came out in 2005, she's seen an enormous shift, she said.

Her publisher wanted her to do things she knew absolutely nothing about: create a web page,...

My late mother loved the New York Times crossword and she loved reading mysteries. Born in Poland, she said the puzzle helped her perfect her English; she never explained the specific appeal of crime novels, but she was a huge fan of Agatha Christie, John Creasey,...

I never set out to write mysteries, gay or otherwise. When I launched my career as an author, it was with short stories.

But one of them, "Remind Me to Smile," featured a couple of academics faced with a bizarre situation: Stefan has gotten an ex-lover of his a job...

Roxane Gay recently pointed out in Salon that all our discussions about whether women writers like best selling Jennifer Weiner don't get enough press coverage miss a major point.

Writers are easily dissatisfied, no matter what they've achieved. As Gay puts it so beautifully: "What most writers have...

It's no wonder I fell in love with Edith Wharton in college, given that I grew up in Gilded Age New York. The building on upper Broadway I was raised in was one of two massive apartment blocks built circa 1900 by Harry Mulliken with gorgeous tapestry brickwork and stone...

On my recent book tour in Germany for my memoir, My Germany, I was reminded of what a rich book culture that country has when I browsed in crowded book stores at the train stations, and studied billboards for all kinds of books, not just thrillers.

And...

I've been reviewing crime fiction for well over a decade on-air, in print, and on-line, and always look for something original. I found it in Justin Evans's amazing 2011 thriller The White Devil, my favorite crime book of the year.

Ask yourself what's worse: thinking you saw a...

I've belonged to the same gym for two decades and at the beginning of each year, attendance during the mornings when I work out really jumps. It's harder to find an empty locker, the cardio machines are jammed and you have to be prepared to wait for some weight machines.

I bet you never realized A Christmas Carol was in danger, did you? And it's not from people supposedly trying to take "Christ" out of Christmas.

No, the real danger is poor, dead Dickens himself. Journalist Jesse Kornbluth has published a version of Dickens' novella that's been cut...

I fell in love repeatedly in college. With authors. I was an English major and reeled from one new passion to another. Some of them feel like youthful indiscretions now. Tobias Smollett and Dreiser are two of those.

Other loves have lasted and deepened as I've grown older and...

Authors often feel like DHL parcels on a book tour, delivered from one venue to another. Small things can feel like big problems: iffy internet service at the hotel; a plane or train being just a few minutes late; forgetting where you put something because you've packed and repacked your...