Sarah E. Moffett

Four faded, tattered, ink stained notebooks covered four months, 28,000 miles, and the better part of every train stop from London to Tokyo and back again by way of vodka laced Siberia. By the time I put down the resulting compilation of those notebooks, Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, I felt like I had […]

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Kevlar, goulashes, water, sunglasses and an infinite supply of patience. All the necessary gear for attending and surviving the 2008 National Book Festival. Rumor has it the Woodstock for Bibliophiles, Part Ocho, featured 70 authors and drew over 120,000 to the intermittently rain soaked Mall this past Saturday and put the security team for Laura […]

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Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Old Man and the […]

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Only in the literary world. This past week in the literary world we lost some, we lost some more, and we just…kept…on…losing. First up was the death of Thelma Keane, the inspiration for the Mommy character in the long-running “Family Circus” comic created by her husband, Bil Keane, has died. The latest James Bond novel, […]

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Sunday morning I glanced at the columns in Washington Post’s Book World and promptly felt the need to add another shot to my Bloody Mary. It read like a Who’s Who for newly released titles covering divisive politics and doomsday economics. Over ten columns of lovely Sunday morning reading stared back at me with euphoria […]

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Atleast, that’s what the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit organization supported by the publishing industry, all but predicted with the release of its projections for the industry, which include a paltry 3 percent to 4 percent growth through 2011, when revenues should top $43 billion. CNN reported that the BISG expects little change in […]

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“It’s nice to have your own place, I will admit that. And it’s nice to have your own time because you can keep people from calling you on the phone and breaking your concentration. Of course, what they’re really doing by breaking your concentration is scaring that scruffy little fleabag back into the bushes.
“That part […]

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My heart is propped up by a Scotch. I just finished one of those books. The ones that pull your insides out through your eyeballs, wash them in enlightened intelligentsia and marinate them in emotion before shoving them back in word by word, page by page, chapter by chapter. “A novel is not, after all, […]

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Whoever said the first time was the hardest never tried to write a second book.
In a word, this entirely introspective, spastic, and enlightening experience may be summarized in three letters. ARG. Writing book two feels like I’m strapped down on a table enduring Chinese water torture that is percolating right through my forehead and out […]

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How To Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth is the alternative title for Kinky Friedman’s Guide to Texas Etiquette, an anthropological study meets comedic satire on, you guessed it, Texans. This jewel of an airplane ride read includes things you would never hear a real Texan say, final meal requests from […]

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