Awhile back when I was pregnant and almost forty and pregnant and dragging my three-year-old everywhere and tired all the pregnant time, I wrote at The New York Times’ Motherlode about how sick I was of reading certain books out loud to my son. I listed the books I found particularly annoying or, in the case…
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Hansel and Gretel Baby Food Stylists Make Your Baby Look Good Enough to Eat! It’s holiday card season, which means it’s time to show off your plump offspring. While well meaning, many home cooks and amateur photographers make mistakes when staging the all-important roasting pan baby photograph that could have the unfortunate…
I always knew Beverly Cleary was a great writer. I read every single one of her books growing up — even the lesser-discussed ones like Otis Spofford and Ellen Tebbits with all the angst over something called “long underwear” that was mystifying to me as a kid in the 80s. I read most of them…
Before today, the only reason to wear a monocle was solely so the toffy-nosed lord of the manor in Nether Wallop could allow it to drop in abject surprise at the brigadier’s naff shenanigans on the Brompton Road. But now eyeglass maker Warby Parker has fulfilled every monocle-yearning hipster’s dreams. Currently the Warby Parker monocle…
Avidly is starting to run pieces about the experience and labor of writing. We’d like to encourage people with different perspectives–academic, non-academic; professional, pleasurable– to send us essays on the questions writing raises for them. Just click on “Submissions” above. — Eds. 3/6/2013 Ed. Note: Stephanie’s piece has generated some debate. Read Lauren W.’s response, “Why I…
At Avidly, I’ve been exploring the idea that some of literature’s most romantic moments are the G-rated ones from our childhood — those that leave much unsaid and undone, but still manage to strike a sweet, tender nerve within us that continues to resonate through adulthood. Recently, I collaborated with Lisa Schmeiser and Lora Alexander…
In my discussion of the Top Ten Most Romantic Betsy Ray-Joe Willard Moments, I posited that Betsy and Joe’s impassioned meeting right after she gets off the S.S. Richmond in Betsy’s Wedding was the closest thing to a sex scene we were ever going to get out of author Maud Hart Lovelace. This sparked a thoroughly…
Writers have very large and extremely fragile egos. This is why we go into bookstores and look for our books, pull them face out, and get our days ruined if the store doesn’t actually carry us. It’s also why every time I go to my local library I hop on one of the computer terminals…