When Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time  came out several years ago, someone hid money at the back of one copy to see if anyone  got to the end of this complex work on cosmology.  The book hit the best seller list and remained there for 4 years, but no on

Recently, I discovered that on Amazon’s book rankings, the works of John Keats and William Wordsworth are listed 796,426 and 2,337,250 respectively, only slightly higher than mine. (“Counter Culture,” by Caleb Crain, Harper’s, July 2015 pg.82.)  Naturally, I, a modest wr

When Prerna Gupta decided to take a year off to write fiction with her husband, the couple experimented by crafting stories for cell phone apps.  Though the pieces were short, no more than a 5 minute read, only 15% of viewers finished them. That’s when the pair decided to experimen

The trick to make something old seem new again is to describe it using different words. The world will be mesmerized by the novelty. The ploy worked for Andy Warhol’s soup cans and made him a fortune. To be honest, I don’t believe there’s been a new idea in literature since Thea

Winning the Pulitzer Prize won’t ensure a writer respect from a certain cadre of critics, those who owe their high perches to their employment rather than to any literary achievement.   For good or ill, these arbitrators of taste imagine they determine what passes for fine literat