Author Archives: James Mustich

Welcome to the Battle of the Books. On Tuesday evening, July 21, we held a virtual Battle of the Books in collaboration with the Plainview-Old Bethpage Public Library. This was the third virtual Battle we’ve done, and I continue to be pleasantly surprised by the way online channels—we’ve used both Zoom and Crowdcast—prove congenial to […]

A round of memories. “The binaries of the modern moment don’t suit a lot of lived experience,” said Samantha Power. The former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, was talking to Mitchell Kaplan, proprietor of Books and Books in Miami, […]

Rhymes on my grandmother’s 100th birthday. Time came with you on the immigrant ship The wished-for century of luck and hope You carried within you the length of the trip A resilient, intricately coiled rope Whose strength has served you for a hundred years. Just like you, grandmother, to take the trope We use to […]

The writer who made me want to write. Upstairs in my parents’ house, in a room off what was, in our teenaged years, my sister’s bedroom, are the remains of the library I assembled through my first twenty-odd years. The rows of spines on the two walls covered with shelves are riddled with gaps, representing […]

Late at night with my mother’s favorite books. I sit in my parents’ living room in the wee small hours of the morning. It’s dark except for the illumination provided by the large television that is my father’s constant companion as he dozes and wakes in his reclining lift chair, ruminating, I can only suppose, […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. Tall trees surround our house, spaced across the hilly lawn like stately privacies. Their sleek, strong trunks reach beyond the roof before they ramify into clusters of branch and leaf—earthbound, rooted clouds that nonetheless depend upon the sky. To sit beneath them and look up, as I did […]

On Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen,” we read as we approach the end of this book about race, identity, language, and memory: “Come on. Let it go. Move on.” The phrases echo others sounded on earlier pages in their urging that the consciousness at work—the “you” being addressed—evade […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. The assumptions that anchor our days, those habits of heart and mind we rely on to palliate the tyranny of the actual, are invisible allies—or are they as often enemies?—in our never-quite-settled war with the world.

Suggestions for therapeutic reading. In his taut, eloquent introduction to The Journals of John Cheever, the author’s son Ben recalls that his father “used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache.” Such allusion to the medicinal benefits of good writing made […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. It can come as a shock to recognize that the straight-and-narrow is more oblique than one imagined, and that the suspension of disbelief, in religion as well as drama, can be far more cunning in the long run than rationality might be able to measure. As Pascal said, […]