American Writers at Home. Text by J.D. McClatchy; Photographs by Erica Lennard; Library of America and The Vendome Press, 2004; 224 pages; $50. FROM THE DUST JACKET: American Writers at Home affords an unprecedented opportunity …

Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies). University of California Press; January 2005; 472 pp.; $29.95 FROM THE DUST JACKET: Paul Bontemps decided to …

GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. Harvard University Press; 368 pages; $25.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million Jews entered the …

Pink Steam. Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004; 190 pages; $16.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Pink steam rises from the vats of melting goo in the Vincent Price 3-D horror classic, House of Wax. Railroad buffs know …

Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages; $24. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Open House gathers observations, reminiscences, anecdotes, and …

Dust of Snow The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heartA change of mood And saved some partOf a day I had rued. …

Christmas letters. I don't know their history, who first wrote one, or where and why. I suspect they began to be written in the I Love Lucy Eisenhower years when all Americans, even though in …

FROM THE DUST JACKET: A cigar-smoking proponent of free-verse modernism in open rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage, Amy Lowell (1874-1925) cut an indelible public figure. But in the words of editor Honor Moore, "What …

FROM THE DUST JACKET: Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only in his private journals, in which he catalogued his innermost feelings, that …

Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; 435 pages; $27.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: In an attempt to understand the growing influence of the Christian Right, sociologist and documentary …

FROM THE DUST JACKET: Truman Capote was hailed as one of the most meticulous writers in American letters — a part of the Capote mystique is that his precise writing seemed to exist apart from …

A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004; 208 pages; $20. FROM THE DUST JACKET: While traveling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the …

Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. 420 pages; $35. Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 446 pages; $35. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003: The poems of Pulitzer Prize-winner …

“I was in Sierra Leone, right next door, and in its history bears the same relationship to England that Liberia bears to the United States. That was when the bodies started piling up in Monrovia.”

Karl, of course, was into blood sports. I learned a lot from him about that world of anonymous sex and violence.” “Karl” is Karl Keller, for 20 years a professor in San Diego State’s English …

Someone I look up to once told me I should always try to write as if I were writing to someone who had six months to live. Think of your reader, I was told, as …

“Linda Vista, with its rows of yellow houses, is where we eventually washed to shore. Before Linda Vista, we lived in the Green Apartment on Thirtieth and Adams, in Normal Heights. Before the Green Apartment, …

Frank Doubleday, in Europe at the time Norris bought Dreiser’s novel, on his return home read the manuscript and hated it. Not only did Doubleday not wish to publish it, he thought it filthy and morally wanting.

Robert Penn Warren’s “Function of Blizzard” - back when I lived where snow fell every winter, a friend and I, on the occasion of the year’s first snow, would get together to recite this poem.

The Roberts Book Company on Canal Street reputedly paid the junkman S55 for the canvases. Soon “piles of unstretched canvases and large sheets of mural cartoons, began to greet the surprised visitors to the Roberts Book Company.

The Art of Burning Bridges Alfred A. Knopf, 2003; 373 pages; $30 FROM THE DUST JACKET: An enigma of 20th-century literature — a writer accorded great importance in his time, if less than in his …

One of the most pleasurable aspects of Geoffrey Wolff’s O’Hara biography is the voice. I said, “It’s a confiding voice, as if we were on some country weekend, in the mid-1930s, before the start of World War II.

"I sent them to Juris Jurjevics at Soho Press in New York. He’d been James Baldwin’s editor at Dial Press. Juris is respected in New York as an ambassador from a more thoughtful, writerly era in publishing."

“It’s been a long and difficult journey,” I said, “from Sun Up San Diego to Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant.” “I know,” said former KFMB-TV Sun Up cohost Kathi Diamant, the author …

T. Jefferson Parker stares out the window of his Fallbrook office. What he sees is eucalyptus. “And then,” he said, “beyond the eucalyptus, there’s the tangerine tree and the two orange trees and a lemon …

“She told me stories that revolved around Point Loma Nazarene University. Eric’s mother’s mother first met Paramhansa Yogananda. Eric’s mom also met him, and she said he was the sexiest man who ever lived."

"My mother read to us every night of my childhood. My becoming a writer in part was because of that. You should have seen how my mother would become rapturous when she read a book she loved."

"Luria Sukenick, professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State, refused to teach Dickinson because of the horrible things that students say. She was upset by the things that people said about Dickinson’s poems."

"I think Chateaubriand is the only man who met both George Washington and Napoleon. He came to the United States and wrote about Niagara Falls. He may be the first person who described the falls for a European audience."

Why Rossetti asked that Siddal’s body be exhumed was that, in a melodramatic gesture, he’d tossed into her coffin the manuscript of his poems. When he decided he wanted the manuscript back, he had the body dug up.

"1 really wanted to try and get a pure sensation of what it felt like to have the thing on, to feel that that was the only recourse, was to wear this thing, to be driven to wear it.”

Solana Beach Presbyterian Church members felt hurt and betrayed and outraged and surprised when they learned that for more than ten years their former pastor, a trim and handsome married man, had been sexually intimate …

Eileen Jackson's daughter, Jerry Williamson, told me that her father had once said that Miller had “the soul of a poet.” Mrs. Williamson confessed that when she was a child Miller terrified her.

As I read Chekhov stories about which Ms. Malcolm wrote, that I began to feel that these subtle stories, which on the last page often seem to evanesce rather than conclude, are wasted on the young.

As for Naipaul's willingness to talk with me, he said, in his beautifully modulated voice, “It’s not correct for a person of my stature to appear on a giveaway sheet. It’s not right. It’s not right.”

The Altar of the Body opens with George sitting on his porch on a hot day in Medicine Lake, Minnesota. He watches a man push a Lincoln Continental. “It’s an old car, a four-door boater, champagne-colored.…”

“Millay was the generation of my grandmother, so when you begin the biography of someone of this age, you realize the people you need to interview who are living may not be living a great deal longer."

“You’re living in two worlds. You’re living in a public one, and you believe it, you believe that the Russians are your enemies. And you’re living in a private world where this Russian is the father you love.”

And T.S. Eliot, I remember his giving a reading at the University of Michigan, and the entire football stadium was filled to hear him speak. Eliot had that kind of celebrity. He had a kind of authority.

“Going from New York Press to Talk was a bit like going from the St. Ann’s School to the Collegiate School. At New York Press you could pretty much wear whatever you want.

“It’s funny, too. The people I really wanted to meet were writers. I had some notion of meeting Flannery O’Connor, you know, or even now, I imagine meeting Cormac McCarthy. Writers were my heroes.”

“Liberalism went from being populist to being corporate, from being Jeffersonian to being New Deal. And it had its greatest successes, and it also had its greatest defeat, as a result of that change."

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

Dead, dead, dead is what I think now when I think, “Father.” My father’s dead. My father’s underground. More than a decade, my father’s moldered. His big belly’s deflated. His big belly’s dust and rubble. …

"In Texas, people will laugh at anything. So you can still learn things from reading out loud there, but you can’t think, ‘Oh well, this works great. They laughed in Texas.’ Maybe they’re just trying to be polite."

"You would be surprised at the number of gerontophiles. You realize there are a lot of people who didn’t take notice of you when you were in your 20s, who get interested once you’re over 45 or 55.”

They seemed vaguely hostile toward Brookner’s stories. “Nothing happens,” one said. We argued a bit. I suggested that plenty happened; it was just that what happened, happened inside her characters’ heads rather than between sheets or on battlefields.

Jon, who was as old as Uncle Carl was then, which was 50-something, shook his head and looked sad. Jon had a long, narrow head and skin that always looked tanned because he used a sun lamp.

I didn’t become an historian and I didn’t become a Cold War researcher. With my father’s encouragement, I spent a long time trying to create a life that wasn’t just being the son of Alger Hiss.

Dillard is one of those writers whose work I so admire that I dread interviewing them. I always think, before I dial up the telephone numbers, “I should leave them alone to do what they do so well.”