The Girl With the Moomintroll Tattoo 

My summer fling with Tove Jansson

Meet Elena Ferrante, World-Class Peekaboo Artist

The Games Women Play: Part 1

A conversation with memoirist Susanna Sonnenberg about female friendship…

The Games Women Play: Part 2

More on intimacy, intensity, and dirty secrets 

The Best Book You’ve Never Heard Of

How Happy To Be is the sort of book that ends up getting called a “women’s novel.” It also happens to be the best thing I've read in a long, long time.

In it, Toronto writer Katrina Onstead chronicles the comings and goings of an unmarried…

Adventures in Self-Help

Can you read your way out of a creative lull?

The Million-Dollar Kindle Question 

Is there room in this glutted e-reader cover marketplace for one that doesn’t say “I am an idiot”?

The Book Club Crisis

How to dampen a passion

Sidebar Guy

Note to Readers: Please click on on all the notes for essential, sidebar-related information.

Jennifer is a world-class health nut, so I knew I was in trouble when she caught me sneaking a cigarette outside her ex-husband’s wedding. But she completely blindsided me when she said…

The Quarter-Century Book Club

I rarely take off my literary beer goggles. But there was nothing willful or misguided about my affection…