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I wasn't supposed to walk away from the NFL, but I did. I wasn't supposed to be writing television, but I am. I'm supposed to be lost after football. I'm not. I've reinvented myself. This is my first transformation.

No matter how young or old our children are, the laundry is rich with memories and metaphors. Because like parenting itself, laundry is inescapable, repetitive, and never really finished.

So if the message is hopeful, why call the book The Fault in Our Stars? Possibly because this book is not about blind hope; it's about acceptance and perseverance in the face of reality -- a modern realistic fairytale of sorts.

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Here are capsule reviews of three fast-selling paperbacks by famous travel and guidebook writers: good, quick reads that pull the curtain back on a few of the travel industry's dirty little secrets and outright lies.

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"Was it worth it?" my son asks, referring to my unpublished novel, the 10-year endeavor that haunts our meetings, the elephant by my side. How can I answer him? He is 30 and facing the big questions: What shall I do that has worth?

What I blame Jeff for is how stupidly and arrogantly he's squandering the cultural capital he's earned with readers like me by pitting them against writers like me.

Penguin Random House has had a very good summer (as well as a very good year--so far, anyway) when it comes to best-selling ebooks.

Comics superstar Mark Waid is working hard to make comics better. He always has been.

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Hungarian writer Katalin Mezey and I talked about her memories of 1956, her trade union activities, and how the republic of writers has dealt with the issue of collaboration during the Communist years.

That postmodernists confuse its underlying optimism with a latent penchant for anarchy says much more about postmodernism than it does about its paradigmatic successor, metamodernism.

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Let's hypothesize a theater of solitude: a single character grappling with his own interminable discourse -- at intervals whispered and shouted; prosaic one moment, poetic or even epic the next. What is the status, in that case, of this voice that speaks nonstop?

Darcie Chan is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Mill River Recluse. Her rise to success is phenomenal to say the least.

What makes a story impossible to put down? Faculty members of the Salt Cay Writers Retreat offer their best advice to aspiring writers.

Set in the fictional sleepy town of Mill River, Vermont both novels portray the deep complexities of its small town characters and their bigger than life problems.

From bright cafés to sultry brothels and bleak hotel rooms, from rumbling trains to -- in this case -- rusty tubs fighting roaring seas, he creates a compelling world populated by diplomats and spies, dangerous enchantresses and jaded aristocrats, all on the make in one way or another, all engaged in the battle for survival in a world that is rapidly falling apart.

As for methods of getting work done, it's not that complicated. You can write, for hours and hours without stopping, even to eat, or you can write with breaks.

The story reads like science fiction and is constantly introducing themes and premises that are hard to comprehend. The Marcus Sakey who authored this story is not the same Marcus Sakey who charmed us with earlier stories such as GOOD PEOPLE and THE AMATEURS.