To write “Exhibit,” the queer novelist says she had to pretend that no one would read it. “By writing things I’m afraid of saying, I might stand a chance of voicing what I, too, really need and long to see in words.”
“No one should be surprised by a writer’s library,” says the author of the Maisie Dobbs series, about a World War I battlefield nurse turned private investigator. The series’ 18th and final book is “The Comfort of Ghosts.”
“Make eye contact, shake their hand, ask them about themselves and then sign their book with a genuine smile,” suggests the author of the Wyoming-set mystery series. The 20th, “First Frost,” is just out.
In “Reading the Room,” Paul Yamazaki, the chief buyer for City Lights Booksellers, calls this “one of the richest and most rewarding times” to be a literature fan.
Audiobooks have let the artist “stay invested in stories while working with my hands.” Her new project: illustrating Jamaica Kincaid’s “An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children.”
“They’re snapshots of the past: first-night gifts, holidays abroad, memories of lost friends and loved ones,” the award-winning actress says. Her latest, written with Brendan O’Hea, is “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.”
His essay warning that dictatorship was a real threat went viral, which prompted the early release of “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again.” To relax, he reads the sports pages.
The former N.F.L. player has been living with A.L.S. for more than a decade. Sharing “the most lacerating and vulnerable times” in “A Life Impossible” was worth the physical and emotional toll, he says.
“I don’t want other people to miss out on the wisdom and joy this genre has to offer, the way I did for so long,” says the best-selling novelist. “Funny Story,” about a heartsore librarian and the new man in her life, is out next week.
Richard Goodwin, an adviser to presidents, “was more interested in shaping history,” she says, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.” Their bond is at the heart of her new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”
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