Author Archives: James Mustich

Booksellers on the Seine, in the shadow of a cathedral. Nearly forty years ago, in the first flush of our romance, Margot and I sat at a restaurant table looking out on a scene that had been more or less unchanged for centuries. From where we were perched on the Quai de Montebello, on the […]

Or, history and soliloquy. Even to an inveterate book hound like me, the phone casts a powerful spell. The enervating election drama has only exacerbated its hold. Over the past few weeks, particularly the two running up to November 3rd, I found myself, in the middle of each night, standing in my dark bedroom, feeling […]

In the Strand and other book emporia. “We Need Your Help!” That was the subject line of an email I received on the afternoon of October 23. The body of the message was a letter from Nancy Bass Wyden, proprietor of the Strand bookstore on Broadway and 12th Street in Manhattan. She wrote to Strand […]

Or, The Uses of History. A reading life is a mixture of planning and contingency. The former feeds, with steady purpose, the to-be-read piles we build faithfully around the house, marshaling hope against experience; the latter stumbles upon finds in unexpected settings, distracting us into new interests or magnetizing random thoughts into new patterns of […]

Remembering a writer, reader, and friend. In 2007, some time after the end of A Common Reader, my friend Steve Riggio, then CEO of Barnes & Noble, asked me to start a book review on the company’s website. He gave me the best brief an editor ever had: “Make a site that you and I […]

A writing life under the metaphorical gun. I was sitting in the backseat of the car taking me from the airport in Lexington, Kentucky to the college at which I was scheduled to speak that afternoon. My laptop—for once true to its name—was resting on my lap as I cut, pasted, and typed my way […]

An address at Transylvania University, 10.18.18 Good afternoon. I’d like to thank President Carey and the university for inviting me to speak to you today as part of the Creative Intelligence program. I appreciate the warm welcome, and I would especially like to thank each of you for coming to listen. This afternoon I’ll be […]

Reading and remembering in a Soviet prison camp. The most interesting book I’ve read recently is only about sixty pages long, even though it is about a book fifty times longer than that. It is, in fact, not about reading that longer book, but about remembering it; which couldn’t be more appropriate, given that the […]

In the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor. For someone who has lived so long on the page, traveling in books, as opposed to real life, is not as impoverished an experience as it might seem on the face of it. Not when there is writing like this to savor: The sun had gone down but […]

A sojourn in Gascony, a suspension of Spain. We’d planned a trip for this September. It was to be an encore of sorts of our trip to Gascony in May 2018, when we spent a week under the influence of Kate Hill, an American expatriate and cultural and culinary educator who has lived in France […]