Last night, “under the cover of drakness” as NBC’s David Gregory hyperdramatically set the scene, Barack Obama met with his defeated rival Hillary Clinton–much like Jack Mahone met with his defeated rival Godwin Pope in the opening pages of The Coup! Okay, okay, so they met a Diane Feinstein‘s house, and not in a parking …
Had lunch last week with Neal Rechtman, nearly a neighbor from Ossining, and the author of an interesting first novel called The 28th Amendment, which I was happy to blurb. A good guy, and talented, and like me, a onetime student of J.R. Humphreys at Columbia. I hope he sticks with it.
Thanks to an invitation from the inimitable Lewis Burke Frumkes, I delivered the keynote address at the Marymount Manhattan Writers Conference this morning. Lewis asked me to talk about being an editor, so I got to gas on about some of my favorite editorial thoughts, mainly, about how the job of an editor is to …
I had the pleasure of helping my friend Duane Swierczynski launch his new novel Severance Package last Thursday, at a party held for him at The Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street. Duane (pictured above, sighting land) was in good form, holding forth on the genesis of this, his third novel (following The Blonde and The …
Alan Furst is one of the best spy novelists of this or any era, and anyone skeptical of that assertion should immediately read his brand new novel, The Spies of Warsaw. All of Furst’s novels take place in the days just before or just after the start of World War II; this one is the …
Had a happy lunch today with HBO’s endlessly delightful Kat Pongracz at Un Deux Trois. She swore that their new series Generation: Kill will be the greatest thing in military-themed TV since Sgt. Bilko. Plus she paid. (From right to left, above: Kat, me, waiter’s finger.)
Don’t look for Scott McClellan at any Bush administration reunions. His old mates seem none too happy with him these days. Of course, what they’re saying may not be exactly the same as what they’re thinking. WHAT PRESS SECRETARY DANA PERINO SAID: “[The President] is puzzled, and he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan …
McCLELLAN’S CRITICS: WHAT THEY’RE REALLY THINKING Read More »
As most of you who read this blog know, in my novel The Coup, President Mahone is forced to resign when the world learns that he has had an affair with a young woman who is also linked to the head of China’s espionage agency (although, as readers know, much about this relationship has been …
Fans of the late Patrick O’Brian (whom I admire above all others) who miss his tales of men at arms should take a look at a new novel by Steven Pressfield called Killing Rommel. No, the novel doesn’t take place on the high seas, but on the great sand sea of the North Africa desert, …
My new favorite artist is James Gillray, a caricaturist who was one of the great satirists in British history. Working in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the rather solitary Gillray made engravings that savaged all the customary targets: parliamentarians like Pitt and Fox; the royal family, especially George III; the French, especially Napoleon; and …