In which I participate in a Q+A about my cell-phone novels story on the New Yorker's Web site...

I just did an interview about cell-phone novels on "Word of Mouth," Virginia Prescott's show on New Hampshire Public Radio.

Litmob.com is featuring a poem of mine—"Quail"—and a short piece I wrote about it.

12.15.08: I have a piece in this week's issue of The New Yorker, about young women in Japan who write novels on their cell phones and are taking the literary world by storm. The novels, published as regular books, are selling amazingly well: five of the ten literary bestsellers for 2007 originated as cell-phone novels (keitai shosetsu in Japanese). The readers, like the authors, are young women, teens, and girls in the provinces, who likewise read the novels in short installments on their phones, through specially-designed media-sharing Web sites. They buy the books as souvenirs, emblems of their membership in an on-line community.

I visited the L.A. Times the other week and caught a glimpse of a first-rate, glassed-off test kitchen there among the cubicles. A staffer told me that every recipe printed in the paper is tested in it first. This inspired me to try the famous Russ Parsons dry-brining technique. (He got it from Judy Rodgers, she of the Zuni Café and the difficult-but-worth-it cookbook.) There was nothing to it—a sprinkle of salt, some absent-minded rubbing. Serving a bird just as juicy as Parsons said it would be, I felt a little coy, like one of those new mothers who claim that they barely noticed they were carrying a child.