Identifying with an activity is different from actually doing it. For example, 49% of Americans play video games, but only 10% identify as gamers. According to a recent survey we conducted, there’s ...

I think writers are admirable, on the whole, and I often wonder where they get all their ideas; but I do wish some of them wouldn’t try so hard to make their readers feel backward. There is really no ...

Smiley Anders, whose column appeared in this newspaper for many years, will be remembered as an artful scribe, leaving behind thousands of columns and several published collections of his work when he ...

Born Hawkins Mitchell in Southeast San Diego and sent to St. Augustine High School, he was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford. He began writing feature stories for the Reader at the urging of Judith ...

Consider, for a moment, the unforgiving nature of short fiction. Many highly esteemed novels contain stretches that stumble, lumber and digress, with such “fat” either pardoned in the larger context ...

There’s no question that it takes a village to make a novel a success, no matter how wonderful the writing and the story. I started building a tribe that would help to define me as a novelist, in my ...

Roger Anderson, who wrote Wednesday's story on Lester Bangs at Altamont and Friday's on Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, grew up in El Cajon, was part of early San Diego rock scene, wrote for alternative ...

Sixty years ago, South Bend, Indiana, offered America a preview of what was to come in the industrial heartland. The Christmas 1963 shuttering of the Studebaker automobile plant foreshadowed the ...