April 9, 2026
The choice offered Achilles is between living to a comfortable old age, and his name soon forgotten, or an early death, but undying fame. We know which fate he decides on. He is, perhaps, spared disillusion. In the darkness, just beyond the firelight, Ajax falls on his own sword, from shame, because he’s been denied the armor of Achilles. Are these Greeks of the Bronze Age somehow different in character, or virtue, from the people we hope we might be? Are we talking about honor, or aspiration, or is it simply performance, an overly dramatic self-regard?
The Drowned Kingdom
September 19, 2025
The volcano that erupted underneath Santorini in the Bronze Age produced tidal waves, and enough ash to darken the sun. The earthquake that came afterwards destroyed the labyrinth of Crete. There’s a long-held race memory, for that matter, that the entire Mediterranean basin was once a fertile lowland, that flooded catastrophically when the Atlantic burst through the Pillars of Hercules. The tectonics of the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau are a petri dish for disturbances in the continental crust, and the Greeks gave the god Poseidon both a bull as his symbol, and the name Earth-Shaker.
Nick Anderson/Hearst Papers
Charlie Kirk was a racist, misogynist, Fascist-adjacent oinker who leveraged his platform with a message of retributive violence and tribal hatreds, and took up too much air in the room. He is, in fact, a Horst Wessel for our time. An empty windbag the MAGA faithful can fill with the milk of vitriol. It says everything that they clutch him tearfully to their breasts. The brand is venom. It’s toxic slush, and Charlie Kirk is a clickbait whore, dead by his own hand.
March 17, 2025
Now, remember, this was wartime. And as crazy as it sounds, those two guys walking up that snowy road in rural seacoast Maine were, cross my heart, actual Nazi spies, dropped off by a U-boat that had snuck in from the North Atlantic, and threaded through the islands and the shoals to a landing spot on the rocky shoreline, the same rocky ledges I knew from picnics, where we picked mussels at low tide, and lobstermen hauled pots. The water in the inlet is no deeper than twenty-five feet. You’d feel your way up that shallow, unfamiliar channel, with the boat submerged at periscope depth, and touch bottom once or twice. If you were that German skipper, you had balls of steel.
Photo courtesy of David Edgerley Gates
September 29, 2024
Every family keeps secrets. Often they're benign, or not even what most of us would even call secrets, in the sense that they're simply common knowledge: all the grownups know the story, and it doesn't occur to them, to explain it to the youngsters; this creates an air of mystery around something easily remedied.
My grandmother's house was haunted. Exaggeration for effect, I can hear you saying, but I mean it literally. I was little, four or five years old, and it made me deeply uneasy to spend the night there. It was dark, and full of heavy furniture, and even the paintings were left over from the turn of the century. And it was chilly - not physically, but a kind of emotional chill, the nursery empty of children's laughter.
Landscape is character. I had a new subscriber to my Substack column tell me one of the things he really liked about my Cold War spy novel Black Traffic was the evocation of Berlin, which took him back to the time when he was a kid, growing up in the city. I was very flattered. I certainly wanted Berlin to be an active presence, not just a backdrop. I think this is true of the bounty hunter stories, too, the physicality of the country, between the desert and the sown, and the people taking on the character of the unforgiving terrain.
"Hello, Bookstore"
November 12, 2025
I’ve had a lot of eye-opening conversations with Matt. He’s always been a very alert reader. He was the one who pointed out the elegance of the last line of John Crowley’s Little, Big to me – a shared appreciation – but truth to tell, I’d missed it, first time around. I think, too, that I would have turned a deaf ear to Lawrence Durrell, if not for Matt. Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. Patrick Leigh Fermor, maybe. He can be very attuned to what a reader might not realize they’d been missing. This is the natural magic of the bookshelf, one thing next to another.
Matt Tannenbaum - Photo Credit: Bill Shein/Berkshire Argus
Lawrence of Arabia changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. I’d seen pictures before that affected me deeply, and quite a few I’d gone back to see more than once. I knew vaguely about the auteur theory. I realized movies were made, they didn’t somehow spring from the brow of Zeus. But on the most basic level, I didn’t actually understand that a movie was intentional, that it was calculated and specific.
