Lev Raphael's Blog, page 63

Travels With Jane Austen

My favorite memory of Emma is reading it in a hammock at the edge of my uncle's orchard outside Tel-Aviv. I loved it best among her books at the time, and I'd brought it with me almost as a talisman since I'd never been so far from home.



Austen was like home for me. It's what Anatole Broyard wrote in Kafka Was All the Rage : "Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories."



With all...

Edith Wharton Is Hot

You read that right, Edith Wharton is H-O-T. Who says so? Entertainment Weekly , and they ought to know.



Two new novels are about to be released with stories inspired by Wharton, and some of her classics are being reprinted in gorgeous new editions.



This is great news for Wharton fans. In Florence a few weeks ago, at an international Wharton conference, one of the questions I kept hearing over drinks and dinners was this: when is it Wharton's turn? Yes, there've been some movies of her work, but...

Check Out A Different Side Of Florence

Almost 15 years ago I spent time in Florence seeing as many of the famous sites as possible. You know the list: the Duomo, the David, the Uffizi, Santa Croce. It was May and the small city was swarming with tourists. The buzz of residents' motorbikes made me feel I was in a mosquito-crazy swamp.



Then a writer friend who knew Tuscay well invited me and my spouse across the river to the Oltrarno District. We had dinner and drinks at Piazza Santo Spirito and it felt like being in a different city...

Why I'm Not Planning a 'Hunger Games' Knockoff

Over the course of my publishing career, friends have encouraged me to write a thriller: "How hard can it be?" Even my late mother used to say, "Write something like those books on the bestseller list." She meant thrillers, of course.



I've published memoirs, biography, psychology, historical fiction, mysteries, literary fiction, a Jane Austen mashup, an essay collection, and more -- but never a thriller. It's not snobbery. I love the genre. Some of my favorite authors are Ken Follett, Daniel S...

S**t People Say to Jews

Wait, you guys have Sunday on Saturday? Isn't that confusing?



He's your type, he looks Jewish.



So he tried to Jew me down. Oops. No offense.



Is that really your own nose?



I can't help it, Jews are damned to hell. That's what my pastor said. But we can still be friends!



You don't have Christmas? Why not?



No tree? No presents? Nothing? That is soooo sad.



Your hair is really kinky. Can I touch it?



The Bible is just so angry. I mean, the part your guys wrote.



When you get married, do you have to shave you...

The Teacher Who Changed My Life

She retired this week after forty years, the teacher who changed my life.



I had dreamed of being a writer since I was in second grade, but it wasn't until I took my first class with Kristin Lauer at Fordham University that I fell in love with writing itself.



She was my first and best creative writing teacher and was endlessly inventive in her choice of assignments. But more than that, she was a model for how I would teach when I entered academia for a while years later. She did not believe in p...

S**t People Say to Writers

Have you been published?



What do you write? Oh.



Do you have, like, a real job?



I don't read much.



Do you know Stephen King? What's he like?



You should write a book about my life, it's a bestseller for sure.



I'm gonna write someday, when I have free time.



My sister likes to read. Have you written anything she would know?



You write novels? I only read stuff that's real.



I read your book. It was... interesting.



My mother loves your books.



I've got a great story for you!



I thought books were dead.



You shoul...

Writer's Block Is Bunk

That's not exactly what prize-winning author Loren D. Estleman recently said at a Michigan writer's conference, but it's close.



The problem with even using the term, he said, is that it's a supremely unhelpful way of saying something very basic and ordinary: you're stuck.



I totally agree. When you say you have writer's block, you turn a minor problem into something major like depression or even cancer. Suddenly you're beset by a grave affliction. When writers say they have writer's block, a no...

Is Reading Easier in 2012?

A novelist friend laughingly told me about getting lost a while back while reading -- but not lost in the book. Lost outside of it. She found a reference to the Seven Years' War and because she wasn't sure what that conflict was (it pitted most of Europe's major powers against each other from 1756-63), she set her book down and went to her Mac to Google it.



Online, she jumped from one intriguing website to another, ranging further and further afield from the French and Indian War, to Frederick...

Writing a Muscular Mystery

I write an academic mystery series and because other books of mine have been taught around the country, I've done a lot of readings and talks at universities in the U.S. and even abroad. At almost every school I've visited, Ivy League or community college, someone tells me about a scandal, feud, or vendetta worthy of Monty Python or Joseph Heller.

The ideas and stories people offer me compete with the ones already swirling through my head. I've always been making up stories about people I ...