“I would not miss: most of human history (The Inquisition, The War in Vietnam, The Endless War in Afpakiraq, the Israelis vs. The Palestinians, The Northern Irish vs. The Southern Irish, The Bosnians…

“It was one of her astonishing gifts—and many people are now attesting to this gift in the wake of her death this past spring—to notice when a fellow sentient being had caught her…

“Now, I have a problem with New Jersey. I loathe it in its entirety. Countless times in my long life, I have said aloud that there are two places I would never live:…

“For a young woman writer who had lost patience with the clever, artificial and antiseptic prose of Updike, Mailer and the other anti-feminist, essentially anti-life “big boys” of American prose writing, Nin was…

“In the years since I’d last been there, The Esso Club had morphed into a . . . mega-sports-bar, punctuated by huge flat-screens, intelligently amusing items of bar-décor, and literate, drop-dead-gorgeous wait staff…

“For the most part, the South Carolina I’ve known since my birth in 1951, is fast-morphing, with the recovery of the country’s economy at large, into a country of other men entirely: Spanish-speaking…

“Now, in Ten New Songs’ ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ Cohen has ‘transposed’ Cavafys’s great lyric about courageous resignation, dignity in defeat, from Marc Antony, on the eve of his and Cleopatra’s death in Alexandria, to…

“I sit on the sofa with my husband, watching news of Sandusky’s decades-long abuse of boys in his care and, at 60, am right back there in Dr. B’s bedroom, right back there…

“Only Savage could go after baseball, for Chissakes. Baseball! OK, this is a man who called Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor ‘a stone-hearted racist and a narcissist’—you’ve got to give the guy high marks…

“At age 59, when I wrote the book, My Dears, I never imagined that I would actually, one day, have to read it. Aloud. In a studio the size of a coat closet.…