Everyone I know is having bad dreams. One friend says that in her sleep, an enormous car is trying to break down the front door of her house...

At the book launch of my novel SWIM in August, I wasn’t going to read Chapter 1. Nope, not with my parents there.  I’ve been told by other...

By the time I got to high school in 1966 I was out of my mind. My mother had died; my father had gotten married again, choosing a woman who ...

“History is written by the victors.” While we cannot attribute this aphorism to a specific source with any degree of certainty (some claim...

It always came to me as an image, staying and never dying, until it blossomed into ideas for a novel. I grew up in Hue, Vietnam, imbued...

It was with a heavy heart that I read, in the  New York Times, of Judith  Appelbaum’s death on July 25th at the age of 78. At the same tim...

Joan Baum is a recovering academic from the City University of New York, who spent 25 years teaching literature and writing. Joan has a long...