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...

I've just returned from an eight-event reading tour in Germany for my memoir My Germany, and I had a great time once again. I love the serious book culture that exists in Germany and how authors are respected as cultural figures. I love the comfortable trains and the...

I'm currently on my fourth book tour in Germany, where people value books and authors in ways you don't find in the U.S.

I'm reading from my memoir My Germany in German and English, and the tour is going well, with enthusiastic audiences. But there's also an inner tour I'm...

Essays, stories and books of mine are taught at colleges and universities around the country, so I've spoken at a lot of different institutions over the years, from Ivy League schools to community collages.

They all have something in common. Invariably, a faculty member will take me aside during...

Like the narrator in my latest Nick Hoffman mystery, I've been out for decades. But there are still times when I unexpectedly feel exposed.

My spouse and I recently went to a straight friend's wedding, and it started for us like Four Weddings and a Funeral....

The 3D steampunk version of The Three Musketeers is opening October 21, with Orlando Bloom and Matthew Macfadyen. It looks wild and wonderful and may prompt you to read the book. But which translation of Dumas's novel should you choose?

You may be tempted by...

A lesbian poet friend of mine had an intriguing strategy when she was attacked by Bible-quoters for her sexual identity. Very quietly, she'd say, "I didn't know you read Greek and Biblical Hebrew."

That would stump them, and they'd ask what she meant.

"Well, if you're reading the Bible in...

A friend's father just died only two weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. He was only 72 and the diagnosis and death were a real shock.

People told my friend, "Don't worry, it'll pass, you'll get over it." He felt pressured, not comforted. He'd barely begun to understand the depth...

It wasn't until I recently blogged about loving Jane Austen as a satirist that someone turned me on to Robert Rodi's hilarious blog "Bitch in a Bonnet."

Rodi's title is a tribute. He's angry that the Austen craze has defanged a novelist who's "wicked, arch, and...

Among my twenty-one books are seven academic mysteries I had tremendous fun researching and writing, and that fun has never been spoiled by hearing someone say, "Oh, I don't read mysteries! There's nothing to them!"

Why don't I get annoyed? Because I've also published memoirs, literary fiction, historical...

Jane Austen is so popular these days she's probably been a write-in candidate in more than one election. Who knows, she might even have won some of them. I'd vote for her.

When I started reading Austen in college in the mid-70s, the amazing Austen boom hadn't taken...

I used to put books aside especially for the summer, knowing I'd have more time and feel more relaxed, less stressed, more open to the long loving voyage with an accomplished author at the helm. The late novelist Sheila Roberts once told me that she found nothing so sensually delicious...

Most reviewers don't get compliments from nude fans, but it's happened to me more than once.

That's because people at my gym listen to the monthly book reviews I do for East Lansing Public Radio on a segment called Under the Radar. We try to focus on books the audience...