By James Kaplan 10/25/99 12:00am

Clicking Amazon: Latest Time Sink For Midlist Author

I was 18,506 this morning. To be more precise, the paperback

edition of my recent novel Two Guys From

Verona was ranked at that number on Amazon.com, the on-line bookseller.

Since Amazon currently claims to have 4.7 million titles in stock, I felt

delighted, braced, a little puffed up, even, to be way up Read More

By Regina Marler 3/23/98 12:00am

Learning Just How Plain Language and Love Have to Be

The Half-Life of Happiness , by John Casey. Alfred A. Knopf, 513 pages, $25.

In one of his books on writing, John Gardner tells of the terrible moment of insight and self-loathing in which he realized that the long-cultivated but now instinctive practice of his craft had cut him off from ordinary feeling. He had Read More