

What are your literary guilty pleasures? Do you have a favorite genre? In this case, that label is “women’s fiction,” whatever that means, as though fiction should be gender-specific, even though this is my favorite short story collection in recent memory. While I loathe being labeled politically correct, part of the reason I’m picking her and her sublime short story collection “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” is that it is yet another example of our destructive desire to label things in a manner that often does a tremendous disservice to the talent. I will, however, make the case for Elissa Schappell.


Any successful writer who doesn’t admit that luck played a part in their success is either lying or delusional. There are, of course, an overwhelming number of overlooked writers. Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer. Wait, what? You also asked for a favorite novelist writing today, but since Roth’s most recent book, “Nemesis” (the first of his that made me cry), came out only three years ago, I will still respectfully hold out hope for another while not indicating any dissatisfaction or lack of understanding about his decision to retire. Yes, it’s an unsurprising choice, what with me being Jewish, born in Newark, shiksa-obsessed. . . Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today? I would have been better served taking up grinding glass shards into my eyes or removing my internal organs with a grapefruit spoon. I made the mistake of taking up golf late in life. “Stack and Tilt” is a manual about how to swing a golf club, something I do often and terribly.

Ayelet is always worth a read and I hear her latest is her best. The only reason I’m behind on reading her latest is that family members keep stealing it from me. Anna is one of my first and most insightful readers. What books are currently on your night stand?Īnna Quindlen’s “Still Life With Bread Crumbs,” an advance copy of Ayelet Waldman’s “Love and Treasure” and “The Stack and Tilt Swing,” by Michael Bennett and Andy Plummer. The author of “Missing You” and “Tell No One” says most of his classmates probably remember him “more for the basketball I was dribbling than the book I may have been carrying.”
