Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.

I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.