Eyes wide and blank as the buttons on a first Communion coat.

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder.

If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December's bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same.

If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.

Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.