Tell us a little about your book. A Life in Men centers on a woman traveler, Mary, with cystic fibrosis, who is trying to live as large...

Tell us about your book. It’s a collection of personal essays about what comes after the coming-of-age. I was thinking about adulthood....

The Wives of Los Alamos is a lyrical, extraordinarily accomplished first novel that I zipped through in just a couple of days.  From...

Tell us a little about You Feel So Mortal. The book is a collection of essays about the body: my own body, female and Jewish; my parents,...

This is a blog post relay, which the lovely and talented Eileen Favorite (author of The Heroines) invited me to join. Question #1:  What...

Tell us a little about your novel. My friend Chris Weiher made a fantastic trailer for the book that you can watch here...

Tell us a little about your book. The book revolves around reporter Charley Hubbs, a die-hard Cubs fan who has landed in Wrigleyville...

Perhaps what is most remarkable about Spike Jonze’s new film Her is the absence that visibly inhabits the film, which is set in Los...

When All Is Lost was in the theaters last fall, I wasn’t sure what I would think. One hour and forty-five minutes with one character, and...

Tell us a little about Cementville. In late spring of 1969, a picturesque southern town is turned inside out by the deaths of seven young...

At the center of REVERTIGO: An Off-Kilter Memoir is a 138-day attack of unrelenting vertigo that began--out of nowhere--on the morning of...

One of the featured events at Columbia College Chicago’s annual Story Week (March 16 – 21) was a reading and discussion with novelist and...

Final blog post for Ploughshares, 4.11.11: Because several of my preceding posts have been very earnest, and also, possibly, a little...

My second book, Little Known Facts, is a novel about a family in Hollywood with a successful actor at its center.  My primary interests...

Certain films, like beautiful, inviting houses, are places where many of us wish we could live.  It’s rare that I feel this way when...

Originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog (March 2011) It’s hard to dispute the omnipresent signs that we are a nation of both...

Originally appeared on the Ploughshares' blog. I realize there is no shortage of essays justifying or vilifying the creative writing MFA...

Originally published on the Ploughshares blog. A number of years ago, I was invited to judge two short story contests, one for the...

Originally published on the Ploughshares blog: Ellen, Rosanne, Whoopi, Tina.  They’re women, they tell jokes, and we’re on a first-name...

Originally published on the Ploughshares blog, winter 2011: I had been writing fiction for fifteen years and publishing stories in...