The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.

What draws me to family... if I were a psychiatrist, I'd say an enormous amount of unresolved personal material. If I were an anthropologist, I'd say families are at the root of social structures - they shape our identity, our belief systems - and so I find them fascinating. Also, I love the idea that families have narratives that are essentially the family story that is passed along generation to generation - and the rifts start when people question the story.

I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.

Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.

You really can't write well if you're thinking about what the reviewers might say.

Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive desires--wanting and needing. It is a novel about the complex relationships between parents and children, a story of loss and of our unrelenting need for acknowledgment, to be seen as who we are. And in the end it is simply a love story for our time.

It's my policy not to review funerals.