"In our daily lives, where we’re bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the …"

"I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. …"

"Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who esse…"

"We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own …"

"As someone from our adoption agency said to us before we left, “You may have been waiting for your daughter for a lon…"

"The best Dorothy Parker-like riposte to nosy questions about adoption was uttered by a friend of a friend of mine on …"

"Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls."

"The thing that mattered most in this elite new world of mine was brainpower—or, at least, the projection of brainpowe…"

"I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment …"

"It’s weird to make oneself one’s “field,” but lots of academics these days are doing it—industriously promoting their…"