It’s not clear why Random House threw 
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment one achieves literary success, but when Stephen King picks up the phone to interrupt your Good Morning America appearance to personally thank you for writing your latest book, you know you are in the ballpark.
It might seem odd to describe a novel that involves barfing in cars, stalking boys and a drunk dad playing beer pong in his underpants as heartwarming, but Beach Week author Susan Coll is a master at finding wisdom in the unexpected.
Remaking society can take decades. But global rebellion is short work for sharpshooter Katniss Everdeen, who single-handedly foments a revolution in Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster young-adult Hunger Games trilogy. America likes its champions reluctant, and Collins specializes in that surly breed: her heroine trounces dystopic despots while chewing her cheek in self-doubt.
I live in Jersey City, about as far from a Betty Draper’s magnolia petal-overlaid redoubt as you can get. But every morning, I am mildly taken aback when I find myself marching among a troop that is entirely female, women of my age and station, ranging from the harried to the glamorous, all pushing one or two offspring toward the park in an assortment of urban-optimized carriages. Really? I think.
Jonathan Safran Foer has a son. He’s not the Son, I don’t think, although I might be forgiven for doing so. Because even though it is generally agreed that we are living in a child-centered moment, Eating Animals, the Everything Is Illuminated author’s somewhat reheated contribution to the recent spate of ruminations on flesh eating (verdict: don’t), is a singular entry in the annals of parenting literature—bypassing a now-commonplace obsession with one’s offspring to head straight to sanctification.
Welcome to ‘Fine Lines’, the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.
EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain. 
A story that rides on its own melting also runs the risk of dissolving entirely. In William Henry Lewis’s second collection of short fiction — his first, ”In the Arms of Our Elders,” was published by Carolina Wren Press a decade ago — the slow, lyric stories of love, loss and longing have a sensuous appeal, but they often threaten to disappear into the ether before they get off the ground.
Excerpt: Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Posted by Lizzie on 03/30/08
From the title essay of David Samuels’ Only Love Can Break Your Heart. The essay, which originally appeared in Harper’s, concerns three weeks at the Derby Lane dog track in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The only bettor I find at Derby Lane who does not complain endlessly about the track is Richard Hens, who has sat in the no-smoking area in Derby Plaza since 1986 with only a few complaints. The most immediately noticeable thing about Hens is not his complacency or the braids in his beard or his enormous shoulders but his style of dress, with the formal vest, the bush shirt and tie, the black spandex shorts, and the paper rings that decorate his fingers. “The last time I shaved I was thirty-two years old,” he says. “I am now fifty-three. The way the braids came about,” he says, when I ask, “was that I was with some lady company one time, and the female asked if she could braid my beard. For the last thirteen or fourteen years, I would say that it hasn’t grown at all.”
On the subject of betting, Hens is all business. “I keep handwritten records in a large file that I have, and I see myself as a professor of the subject you mention.” He fixes me with a trained hippie stare. “The way I see it, your money is the tool that you have.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small wad of cash and counts through the bills one by one. “This here is the nail,” he says, pulling out a five. “This is the level,” he says of a ten. Then he holds up a twenty. “And this is the hammer. The fifty, I call that the chalk-line.” He holds up his hands, stares, and slips the paper rings from his fingers and unwraps them without ever breaking his gaze. “The hundred-dollar bill you see here, that is known to me as the toolbox.”
Hens is known to the staff of Derby Lane as the track’s most dedicated patron, having lived for the past four and a half years in the small lean-to he built behind the track. As we sit and talk, a young man with a truck-stop haircut, sometimes called a “mullet” or a “neck-warmer,” comes up to our table dragging a shy-looking blonde behind him. He slaps Hens on the shoulder.
“Hey Braids,” he says. “What’s the best dog in the race?” Hens rubs his thumbs together and waits until a spark of inspiration finally comes.
“I’d try the five,” he suggests. The odds on the five dog, I notice, are 13 to 1.
Although there are many people who dismiss Hens as a harmless madman, he has also built tip a considerable following among occasional bettors at the track. At one point, I am told, he had over twenty people who would regularly come to Derby Lane to play his tips. I ask him to explain his reasoning on the five, which he does at length and with enough lucidity that I go up to the teller window and bet $10 on the five dog to win. When I return with $282.50 in hand, Hens is not at all surprised.
“I believe that I already told you that I have spent many hours observing the races,” he says. “Over the course of my betting career I have made well over one million dollars.”
What Hens and I have in common, it turns out, besides our interest in the dogs, is that we both like words. On the desk in front of him is a folded copy of the evening’s racing form and a well-thumbed copy of the Webster’s New World Large Print Dictionary, which is held together with electrical tape. The page to which the book is open reveals a number of carefully underlined words and definitions, including faux-naif (“artificially naive”), feather (“any of the soft, light growths covering the body”; the last three words of the definition, “of a bird,” are not underlined), and form (among the underlined definitions are 6, “a way of doing something requiring skill”; 7, “customary or conventional way of acting”; and 9, “condition of mind or body”). As I flip through the dictionary, I am struck by the thought that Hens possesses a fractured version of my own familiar consciousness. When I ask him why he likes the dictionary, he looks off into space for a full minute and a half before he responds.
“I read the dictionary because it is pure and without distracting opinions,” he says. “I have been reading this particular volume for nine months and have studied it completely. The print is large, and it features short etymologies, a general term which means `pertaining to the origins of words.’ I bought it back in ’93. Before that I used to read a Random House dictionary, which I purchased after the divorce. I was thirty years old. I read that edition for approximately three years, but it was not as good as the Webster’s.”<
As we flip through his dictionary, I also discover that the word dog is not underlined or marked in any way. When I ask Hens about this omission, he grows pensive, and it takes him a moment to gather his thoughts. “Animals to me,” he finally says, “such as the dog or the cat, mean very little. This is particularly true of dogs. Dogs bite people for no reason. Once I had to knock one out with a club. The dog is simply another low-life animal. They’re like livestock. I like fish as much as I like dogs. I like birds the most, because of the word ornithology, the definition of which is `the scientific study of birds.’ I would be very grateful to you if you could use that word in your article.”
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