This time of year, sooner or later most of us are hit with The Glut. Generally it’s when we’re in a mall, with Christmas cheer being forced down our ears while people squabble over bargains, but you know the feeling. I have one solution: Give a gift that makes you feel good at the same…

My nephew, who clearly has too much time on his hands, asked me recently if the protagonist of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and other works classified as fiction got her name from Bertrand Russell, specifically Russell’s teapot hypothesis: Russell’s teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970),…

I received my first copy of Touchstone yesterday, and I have to say, it’s going to be a sad day when book go electronic. I won’t mind academia being crammed into the brains of an e-reader, thus saving the spines of generations of schoolkids, but the tactile pleasure of a new book is a joy…

Booklist has given Touchstone a star, a huge relief. And their description of the book is so juicy, it makes ME want to read it. “In England in 1926, New Yorker Harris Stuyvesant is tracking the bomber who blew up his sweetheart and permanently injured his brother. A sinister operative leads him to Bennett Grey,…

On November 30th, we’re giving away TOUCHSTONE! ..and A LETTER OF MARY, and THE MOOR. In a positive orgy of seasonal gift-giving, my web lady Vicki has decided that we’re giving away multiple sets of the two new Picador Russells AND many copies of the TOUCHSTONE advanced reading copy. As she puts it, You have…

Have you seen, or heard about, the film that was made a few years ago on the three woman mystery writers who re-shaped the genre—Paretsky, Grafton, and Muller? Well, the husband and wife team who made “Women of Mystery” have now made “Mysterious California,” featuring four Golden State crime writers. To make it even better,…

The LRK web page has changes, including a book page for Touchstone. With a sample. Enjoy.

A point of clarification: Some of you in the comments have cringed in shame at having been the perpetrator of One of Those Letters that have drawn a book’s mistake to my attention. Worry not, I beg you: The problem I have with Those Letters is not in the receipt, but in having been the…

There’s a deft little thread woven into Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night where one of the academics is perpetually working on the final draft of her definitive book and keeps taking it back to do what modern publishers call “tweak” it. A footnote here, the incorporation of a newly published paper there—her colleagues in the end…

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, we had a wedding in the family recently. And it was just absurdly gorgeous, from the warm autumnal sun slanting through the trees to the beatific happiness that transformed all the faces. It was a Jewish ceremony, with chuppah (the canopy,) the broken wine-glass (said to…