Muashra

What’s the greatest novel ever written? This is a subjective matter, clearly: one man’s Proust is another’s Dostoevski, and the rest of the world can go to Dickens for all we care. For my...

Being a mystery writer – and someone who occasionally teaches mystery writing to wannabe authors – it’s usually a let down for me when I pick up a crime novel, too much like work....

The critically-acclaimed young Brooklyn writer, Jonathan Lethem, has come up with some fairly original notions for novels. In As She Climbed Across the Table, for instance, a woman physicist falls in love with an...

Victorian England makes a fine study of hypocrisy, a veritable Petri dish of civilized manners that are greatly at odds with the reality lurking underneath. I like to imagine proper British tea parties, London...

Vampires can get awfully lonely, lurking in misty graveyards century after century. It’s not easy to be immortal, I suppose, watching empires rise and generations of man go, wondering what it all means. Frankly,...

When I was very young, like a lot of kids I was fascinated by the slightly skewed geological notion grown-ups liked to tell us: that if I dug a hole straight down through the...

It seems like travel has become more uncomfortable with each passing year. I flew to New York recently in a seat so narrow it was nearly impossible to open a book and breathe at...

Face it, you’re just too thin. You’ve been working out at the gym, you’re hardly more than a skeleton, a shadow of your former self, and we simply need to fatten you up. As...

I came across the title of Erich Fromm’s 1941 classic, Escape From Freedom, about twenty years before I actually read the book. It was a title that took on its own life in my...

“A young princess was called Snowflower because she was white like snow and was born during the winter. One day her mother became sick, and the princess went out to pluck herbs that might...