I’m just back from the Boston leg of my book tour where I did presentations at the Saint James Armenian Cultural Center in Watertown and the Brookline Booksmith. Former schoolmates of mine organized the Saint James event, and the afternoon was a warm homecoming for my novel and me. The Brookline Booksmith, which has now hosted me for each of my books, also provided an enthusiastic welcome. Just before boarding the train back to New York City I taped a cable TV show called…

In the old days, publishers sent out bound galleys or proofs to a limited number of reviewers, journalists, film and translation scouts, and booksellers in the hopes of drumming up early interest in an upcoming title. Now there is Net Galley, a platform where a publisher can upload an electronic version of the galleys that provides early access to reviewers, bloggers, journalists, librarians, booksellers,…

We hear that for many writers, the characters they create "come alive" during the writing process. But in what ways is that phrase more than a simple metaphor? And how is a writer supposed to manage the expanded household as it begins to fill up with progeny spilling over from the pages of a…

When I was a graduate student, I worked as Susan Sontag’s personal assistant for one year. I went to her apartment on East 17^th Street on Friday mornings to run errands, take dictation, type letters, and retype essays. (My typing skills were not what she expected so I quickly signed up for a class at a secretarial school near Penn Station that enabled me to pick up speed and keep the job.) I was thrilled to be in proximity to so prominent a writer, and she gave me…

In October, I traveled to Birzeit to teach a one-week course entitled FAMILY STORIES: WRITING FICTION AND NARRATIVE NON-FICTION FROM LIFE at the Palestine Writing Workshop. For inspiration we read work by Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, George Orwell, Grace Paley, and William Saroyan, among others. One of the students, Ian Rhodewalt, wrote a beautiful description of the work we did that week that was posted to…