It’s hard to believe that in one week we’ll be on our way home, after six months here in Paris. I thought I’d share now some observations on the more subtle aspects of life in the city. There is, of course, the miraculous Paris of cliché–baguettes, cafés, the Eiffel Tower, and so forth–but there is . . .
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Unlike back home in America, where Thanksgiving serves as a kind of starting gun for the Christmas season, here Christmas advances more slowly, expressed as a gradual shift in mood and spirit. One day you walk down a street and there’s no sign of decoration. The next, there’s some subtle, pretty change in a display . . .
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I had planned to reside here in Paris secretly, and not tell my French publisher, but then I thought, why be a jerk, a thought that comes to me all too often and in fact a thought that comes to my friends quite often when they think of me. So, I revealed my presence, and . . .
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My wife and I have temporarily moved to Paris, where we’ve rented an apartment. For her, it’s a sabbatical; for me, it’s work, though work of the most pleasant kind. Paris will be my base for the European phase of the research I need to do for my current project, which of course I will . . .
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Today I’m going to revisit something I’ve written about here in the past, because it is a question that comes up often, and that is: Would I ever consider writing fiction? Well, yes, if some irresistible inner force moved me to do so. In fact, as the earliest visitors to this blog know, I have . . .
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Lately I’ve been going through collections of letters from the early 20th century, and once again I’m struck by how rich and detailed such letters can be, and how much they reveal about the era in which they were written and about the people who wrote them. As Samuel Johnson wrote, “In a Man’s Letters…his . . .
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I’ve been asked, often, which phase of the book process I like best: The writing, or the research? I was just now musing on that question, because I have embarked on a new project and once again find myself happily engaged in the hunt for compelling bits of historical detail. That’s not to say that . . .
Read MoreSo, after about two weeks on Twitter I’ve got slightly more than 140 followers. I had to remove one, who seemed to be a female porn star, though I suppose there are worse things than being followed by a female porn star. I’ve found, actually, that Twitter is surprisingly useful. During the recent shootings in . . .
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Recently I finished the paperback tour for my latest book, In the Garden of Beasts, which took me to some 15 towns and cities, from San Diego, CA, to Portsmouth, NH. During my travels I found that one question in particular kept coming up: What advice would I give to someone just starting out as a . . .
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A number of readers have asked why there are so few photographs in my books. I’ll explain. But first, let me throw some napalm on the grill and say this: If it were up to me, there would be no photographs at all. I did get my way with a couple of my books, notably Lethal . . .
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