Starting up

I've not tried this medium before, the Blog.  Not in this more private way -- I've done blogging for The Guardian, the London newspaper.  But here is something more personal.  I'm going to come on this site now and then to share things I've recently written -- and to talk to any readers of mine:  Oh, you're the one!  (as a friend of mine often says when somebody tells him he or she has read a book of his).

I write this from London, where I've been spending a week, largely in connection with the British publication of my novel about Melville.  The Brits, as opposed to Americans, seem literary to their fingertips.  There is so much talk of books.  I just don't feel the same energy of this kind in the U.S., perhaps because the country is so scattered.  Here there is massive concentration in London of media, publishers, reviewers, etc.

So here's a piece about Melville and Hawthorne I wrote for one of the British papers, The Daily Telegraph.  Hope it may interest you:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8257013/Jay-Parini-on-Herman-Melville.html