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Some words earn their place through usefulness; others remain because they open a door we did not know was there. My favorite word in the English language is…

Every life is edited before it is understood. We remember beginnings and farewells with startling clarity, while ordinary afternoons vanish or blur into a…

A manuscript can dominate a writer’s thoughts for years. The final page seems to release the pressure, yet the finished book creates a different kind of…

An excerpt is often the first part of a book a reader meets, yet it has to work under awkward conditions: no shelf, no cover, and no conversation with a…

Flannery O’Connor entered my writing before I had the language to describe the influence. I did not copy her plots or manufacture a Southern Gothic world of my…

Irish-American identity is often reduced to familiar images: county names repeated at family gatherings, green decorations in March, songs carried across…

Good literature does more than carry a reader from one page to the next. It can alter the pressure under which the familiar world is perceived. On Howard G.…

Memories rarely arrive in the order we expect. They gather around a voice, a street, a familiar phrase, or the pressure to keep a secret. A memoir must…

As a civil-rights lawyer before I became a novelist, I learned how often injustice depends on decisions that look defensible in isolation. A hiring practice, a…

Smithfield’s historic trading sheds offer a different kind of morning walk. Among the antiques, clothing stalls and crowded tables of household objects, the…