The forward trenches in the hills just beyond the abandoned village of Talish, in Nagorno-Karabakh, are reminiscent of World War I: long, endless, slits in the ground, the dirt buttressed by wood, with periodic firing posts and dugouts. Stacked tires packed with dirt stand in for sandbags, but otherwise it looks like the Western Front […]
Just how small is this world really? Sarah Aghjayan, 21, has been going to the University of Vermont since the autumn of 2010 and will begin her senior year there this September. Our paths have never crossed in Vermont. Yet last month we met seven time zones to the east in a now largely Kurdish […]
When I was cleaning out my father’s home after he died, I came across a sweater box under his bed. In it were some of the short stories I had written in the third and fourth grade. For a few minutes I sat on the floor and read them, recalling the bedroom in Connecticut in […]
General, Good Reads
IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM, DOCTORS NEED DETECTIVE SKILLS—AND EMPATHY: Why I went looking for inspiration in the ER
18
Mar
Mar
A tenacious ER doctor is the heroine in my new thriller about a deadly pathogen, THE RED LOTUS. My time researching the novel with ER doctors left me gobsmacked and grateful. Thank God they are strong, empathetic, and courageous — and have great senses of humor. Here is an essay I wrote about them, and […]
14
Jan
Jan
14 January 2020 Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends, This month I want to celebrate two remarkable women. An ER doctor and a midwife. Both are characters from novels of mine. First of all, I want you to meet Alexis Remnick — the heroine in my next book, THE RED LOTUS, a […]
26
Mar
Mar
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends, It’s official: the audiobook of my first play, WINGSPAN, landed today. You can download it wherever you download your ebooks. If you enjoy reading scripts, there is an ebook, too. The one-act play premiered last year at 59E59 in New York City and ran throughout the […]
17
Mar
Mar
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who are Friends, I’m asked often about the process of writing: how I approach my day. Invariably, my day begins by watching movie trailers or music videos to get into the right emotional space for whatever scene I am going to write that morning. Movie trailers and music videos […]
04
Apr
Apr
When I was a boy, I had an uncle who married a flight attendant—or what we called back then a (forgive me) stewardess. It was his second marriage and I was too young to understand the enticing aroma of scandal that swirled around the divorce from his first wife, but even as an elementary school […]
04
Apr
Apr
“Filled with turbulence and sudden plunges in altitude, ‘The Flight Attendant’ is a very rare thriller whose penultimate chapter made me think to myself, ‘I didn’t see that coming.’ The novel — Bohjalian’s 20th — is also enhanced by his deftness in sketching out vivid characters and locales and by his obvious research into the […]
31
Dec
Dec
When I was a boy, my parents’ New Year’s Eve parties were not precisely chaotic studies in dissolution and debauchery, but once when I was in elementary school, I walked in on two of their married friends necking in the bathtub in an upstairs bathroom. This wouldn’t have been quite so disturbing for the three […]
