Books

It's Rampur, India in the year 1995. Money is scarce and a monsoon is on the horizon. It is not until the deadly storm hits that people's true characters come out

Where most beginning writers screw up (you should pardon the expression) is in thinking that sex scenes are about sex. A good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids.

In our first chat about Alan Lightman's imaginative Mr g, Alex, Lora and I talk about this retelling of the story of creation — the clever characterizations, how Mr. g's actions have unexpected consequences for himself and others, and how science fits into the storyline.

We exist in an environment where everything we hear about sex — I’m thinking the general media, movies, books, newspapers, not to mention the tall tales of our friends — all concern epic, life-changing, multi-orgasmic lovemaking, where the woman is left weeping with fulfillment and the man lies exhausted like a spent panther. In short, perfect and rather thin, like the ideal of beauty we all know so well.

Lilian Nattel’s new novel, Web of Angels, explores dissociative identity disorder (DID), a condition in which sufferers have at least two distinct personality states or alters.