Like many people oriented towards the humanities I did well in school in all areas except for math and science. Thanks to a close friend who seamlessl...

In our building there lived two women with numbers tattooed onto the underside of their forearms. I remember being with her in the elevator on a number of occasions staring at the numbers on her arm, and her noticing and smiling at me.

We were in Ireland visiting my dear friend Shaun Beary who owns a beautiful rundown horse farm in County Meath. On the last day of our stay we were invited to meet Michael "J.P." Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man.

I remember looking at it out of curiosity, knowing nothing at all about Joyce, when I was eight or nine-years-old. It stood out from the other books adorned with more romantic covers and titles. And I remember leafing through it, lying on the floor, and finding it absolutely nonsensical.

After decades of being frustrated by how ignored Spain has been in the American press, where Europe always meant France and Italy, suddenly it is in the news virtually every day for the wrong reasons.

As someone whose heroes are almost exclusively literary, it is hard to describe the emotions I felt discovering the love affair that occurred in the summer and fall of 1851 between Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville.

This Saint Patrick's Day, on a holiday when everybody becomes Irish without worrying about the burdens, joys, and costs of being Irish in history, let's remember America's great Irish writer, Scott Fitzgerald.

I'm going to roll out a handful of suggested books, movies and albums to get you through the holidays without much sentiment -- while also not falling back on cynicism and despair.

While writers may welcome the Oulipian challenge of crafting prose fit for a tweet, Twitter isn't the first outlet for experimental publishing. And it likely isn't the last.

"If your book ain't wrote with ease, it's weak on the wet, brown breeze." You can thank me when you're prolific.

Some people (like me!) are so busy reading books that they don't bother much with moving-image media such as films and TV. But what about watching YouTube videos relating to ... authors!

Most of us have a certain routine, so it's exciting to pick up a book and end up in another time, place, and situation. To make this experience even more intense, I often try to follow a novel I just read with one that's very different.

What would it sound like if some of history's most prominent authors were enjoined to add their commentary to the games?

'Ulysses' is often seen as a lofty thing, a piece of posturing high modernist literature, one with little relevance to the everyday. Others see it as a book about nothing at all. But these charges couldn't be further from the truth. As a Dubliner abroad, it's like meeting an old friend.

The Irish National Library has very quietly taken advantage of the entry this year into the public domain of the works of Irish novelist James Joyce by posting its horde of rare Joyce manuscripts on its online archive.