The moment Kurt Vonnegut entered my life is seared indelibly in my memory. It stands out starkly, like my first period or my first kiss. All of those memories share a common theme: afterwards, my life was forever changed. I was thirteen, and my friend’s unusually permissive mother left me unsupervised in her well-stocked library. I don’t know why I pulled Mother Night off the shelves. The cover was black with a picture of…

Spring has sprung. Summer has lingered. Fall is falling. And winter is coming.

It’s back-to-school time for all of the little children (and many of the grown-ups like me, who have traded in reading the things we like to read for the things that we have to read). Fall also heralds in the back-to-school bigots who are interested in banning all the good books, and using all manner of explanations to

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