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On the home front, he captures the silent grandeur and froideur of his parents' apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, decorated with paintings from William Randolph Hearst's excess lots, which they bought at Gimbels department store. He encapsulates his uneasy relationship with his fastidious, prematurely old father with this anecdote: "As a child, I was expected to be old, too. 'Roger,' he said one day, 'that's no way for a 12-year-old boy to behave.' 'Dad,' I said, 'I'm 8.'"

Readers of Making Toast may remember Rosenblatt's antics entertaining his newly bereaved grandchildren as "Boppo the Great." He tells other stories about his delight in flaunting decorum, even when it meant embarrassing his children by dancing in the street. And he's not afraid of embarrassing himself. He recalls standing side by side at the urinals with a Washington Post editor in the mid-1970s and wondering aloud about why the "n" is pronounced in columnist but not column. Rosenblatt writes, "Without looking up, he said, 'Roger, I wish I had your problems.'"

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Routine Fosters Resilience In 'Making Toast'

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Mozambican poet, fiction writer and biologist Mia Couto has won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a biennial award sometimes called "The American Nobel." Couto, who has written dozens of books in his native Portuguese, including novels, short stories, poetry collections and a children's book, tells PolicyMic: "It is a sad moment for Mozambique because we are starting a war that we thought would never come back again. So to receive this good news is something like a compensation for me." Sponsored by University of Oklahoma along with the Neustadt family and the journal World Literature Today, the $50,000 prize has been given to writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The executive director of World Literature Today, Robert Con Davis-Undiano, says in a statement, "Mia Couto is trying to lift the yoke of colonialism from a culture by reinvigorating its language. A master of Portuguese prose, he wants to lift that burden one word, one sentence, and one narrative at a time, and in this endeavor he has few if any peers."

Catherine Chung speaks to NPR's Kat Chow about writing and embracing the label "Asian-American writer": "I love English. ... I wrote my first poem when I was seven in second grade. It was a haiku; it was my first moment where I felt like I had control over language in a way that I could express myself or understand myself. I was seven and I still remember the thrill of it, and I feel like because of that moment, I became a writer."

For The New York Times, Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren report on new, Hamas-influenced textbooks used by Palestinian students: "Textbooks have long been a point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which dueling historical narratives and cultural clashes underpin a territorial fight."

Diana Chien has three poems in The American Reader. In "Paintings at Lascaux," she writes:

"The man is already wearing his death
in his face as he falls.
His fingers splay like crows' feet,
and all his thoughts have fallen
to dust, a little seed, a little clear water."

This past weekend's Saturday Night Live was the most-watched episode of the season, but viewers may have been looking for something other than laughs. Saturday's show followed weeks of criticism over SNL's painfully obvious lack of diversity.

Democrat Bill de Blasio won the New York City mayor's race, defeating Republican Joseph Lhota. He became the first Democrat to win the office since 1989.

The Associated Press declared de Blasio the winner about 45 minutes after the city's polls closed at 9 pm ET. De Blasio had what appeared to be an insurmountable lead in polls heading into Election Day.

The election of de Blasio, an unabashed liberal, marked a definitive end of the Mayor Michael Bloomberg era.

Bloomberg, the billionaire capitalist who led the city for three terms was seen by many New Yorkers as a friend to Wall Street and big business but less concerned with the plight of low and middle-income New Yorkers.

Bloomberg was also seen by many New Yorkers as a Manhattan-centric mayor who ignored the needs of the four outer boroughs.

De Blasio, by contrast, promised to focus his policies on the New Yorkers he accused Bloomberg neglecting during his tenure in City Hall. He singled out issues like income inequality, affordable housing and education for particular emphasis.