icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook twitter goodreads question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

Gail Pool died December 22, 2022.

This web site is being maintained to provide continued access to her work.

As a longtime literary journalist, I have published essays, book columns, and reviews in many national publications—from The New York Times to the Women's Review of Books to the Nation—and I have published three critically acclaimed, and very different, books:

 

Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork—a travel memoir (and a love story) about a life-changing journey to Papua New Guinea that reviewers called "provocative," "inspiring," "compulsively readable," and "laugh-out-loud funny."

 

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America—the first and still the only book to take an in-depth, historical, and tough look at this perennially troubled field.  Critics called it "passionate," "thought-provoking," and "mandatory reading."

 

Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories—an Editor's Choice selection at the Chicago Tribune that reviewers called "entertaining," "moving," and "wickedly absorbing."

 

Please take a look at my new website An Anorexic's Alphabet, which focuses on my latest work: a graphic chapbook that uses text, fonts, and illustration to take readers inside the distorted, intellectualized, defensive, little-understood, and eerily intriguing mindset of the anorexic.   (And for a video version of the work, see YouTube.)

 

Besides introducing my own work, this website is also about other writers' books.  On my blog, TraveLit, you'll find reviews of travel literature, a field I covered as a book columnist for the Christian Science Monitor and have continued to explore.   My most recent review looks at The Socrates Express, by Eric Weiner, a witty, and insightful journey that manages to make philosophy fun.

 

I was born in New York City, I attended Hunter College High School, and I concentrated in Ancient Greek at Harvard.  For many years, I taught writing at the Radcliffe Seminars and at Emmanuel College.  I live with my husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Sanibel, Florida. 

   
Connect with me on social media:

Friend me on Facebook
Visit my Facebook Book Page
Follow me on Twitter
Connect with me on Linkedin
Find me on Smashwords
Read my travel book reviews on my blog: TraveLit

My books are available on Amazon and both Lost Among the Baining and Faint Praise are available both as Kindle editions and as ebooks on Smashwords.

 

I would love to hear from readers and I welcome book club invitations.  I'm happy to attend a club meeting or connect by Skype, and I have some terrific New Guinea photos to show--please take a look at my photo gallery