Reading the world from my New York City apartment

One of the best nonfiction books I’ve read is Too Big to Fail, a moment-by-moment reconstruction of the 2008 financial crisis by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin. I was also a journalist during those frenetic days and was frankly envious of Sorkin’s extraordinary access to key figures that gave him a fly-on-the-wall view of how the U.S. economy nearly collapsed. I therefore had pretty high expectations for 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – And

I’ve been writing recently about books inspired by the moon. In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, it’s the scorching sun that drives the senseless murder at the center of the plot. This existential novella completes my trio of posts on the theme of regret, and it’s a big departure from the first two. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway recounts the death-bed regrets of a writer who abandoned his literary talent, while in “Feathers,” Raymond Carver explores a more naggi

After writing last week about the bitter feelings of regret that permeate Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I found myself wanting to explore this emotion from a different angle. My choice this week is "Feathers” by Raymond Carver, a story that is both odd and deeply moving. "Feathers” opens Carver's 1983 collection Cathedral. I have had this book for years and have read some of the stories, but I had never read this one until now. Carver, a master of the short s

I’m a latecomer to The White Lotus, but I’ve now devoured the first two seasons. It’s cleverly plotted, smartly written and the locales (Hawaii in Season 1, and Sicily in Season 2) are gorgeous. This TV series has also sent me back, unexpectedly, to thinking about Ernest Hemingway. Each season of The White Lotus follows a group of wealthy guests at a luxury resort who both lose and reveal themselves while on vacation. By the end of the trip, someone also ends up dead. I'm war

Before discussing this book, let’s take a short detour into the nuances of grammar. I promise this is going somewhere. In English, there is an important difference between “a,” an indefinite article, and “the,” which is definite. “A giraffe” could refer to any of the long-necked, spotted animals, while “the giraffe” indicates a specific one. When you stack together multiple articles and nouns, the shades of meaning can get murkier. In essayist Janet Malcolm’s famous takedown

When helping a Manhattan Reader family member weed through her bookshelves recently, I came across an out-of-print hardcover that caught my eye. I knew nothing about it beyond the fact that it was about ballet, but I brought it home on a whim. Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master recounts the life and career of Michel Fokine, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who was instrumental in transforming classical ballet into a more modern and bold art form. He viewed the grand ba