Two words: punk Muslims.Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo . . . The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at […]

Last month I wrote at some length about copy-edits, their uses, and their pernicious effects on the fragile psyches and self-esteem of writers. “After the copy-edit it comes always the page proofs.” (Which I actually finished a couple weeks ago, but let’s pretend it was just yesterday, okay?) Page proofs are yet another opportunity for […]

So here are the US and UK covers for This Is Not a Game. The virtue of both is that you can see them from across the room. The original US cover— which you can still see at Amazon— started out very much like the UK one, except with chartreuse instead of silver being the […]

Blood is in short supply. We don’t donate as often as we used to, and a lot of people with tattoos and piercings can’t donate on account of hepatitis. And a lot of blood received by people in need— particularly wounded soldiers— is blood that’s been sitting on a shelf for a while.So our friends […]