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