There was a time when Norman Mailer used to talk about the Big Book. It prowled the interviews he gave in the ’50s [...]

It’s cold and dark out, perhaps even snowing. “The Sopranos” reruns on A&E might beckon, and you’ll probably be tempted to watch, even [...]

1. 2006 was so crowded with megawatt names in American fiction that it was easy to overlook (in my opinion) that the best [...]

Aside from lotto tickets, it’s hard to think of a gift with a greater upside than a book. If your beloved doesn’t fall [...]

If you simply looked at the state of his hotel room, Valentino Achak Deng might be any other college student enjoying New York [...]

Now that the presidential biographers have picked clean the American pantheon, from Washington to Bush, it’s becoming apparent that the real founding fathers [...]

Ireland could begin producing a torrent of world-class chemists, shot putters, pet doctors or dentists, but it will be a long while before [...]

Kiran Desai does not at first seem like an angry woman. Her voice as high and quiet as a young girl’s, the first [...]

For a long time, Washington, D.C. was without a fictional chronicler—someone to tell the stories of its people, not just its politicians. Edward [...]

Robert Pirsig has a bone to pick with philosophers. As his era-defining memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance levitated up the [...]