A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- "Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Five short video renditions of Billy Collins' poems.

Smoking used to be sexy, it used to be a sign of that creative energy symbolized by Albert Camus and Hemingway and Picasso and Guru Dutt and MT Vasudevan Nair and a thousand other literary geniuses. Smoking isn't sexy anymore. Cigarette smokers are outcasts in almost all walks of life.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the [...]