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Interview: Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky

Two historians pen a bodice ripper
Long-time friends Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky didn't set out to write Blindspot, a novel complete with murder, scandal, slave stealing, and some very hot sex.

By: CLEA SIMON | December 02, 2008

Swedish schnapps

The Martin Beck mysteries
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck mysteries are back in a fourth American printing.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | December 02, 2008

Ghost story

Toni Morrison's colonial America
Toni Morrison's colonial America

By: RICHARD BECK | November 24, 2008

Never Say Smile

Annie Leibovitz highlights her career
Could there be anyone cooler to have for a photography teacher than Annie Leibovitz?

By: CAITLIN E. CURRAN | November 19, 2008

Excerpt: The School on Heart's Content Road

One week only: an exclusive excerpt from the acclaimed author's new novel
In the cold parlor of the St. Onge farmhouse, deep in the old collapsing couch, sort of wrapped in the couch, in its waves of whimpering springs and hills of upholstery of frazzled blue nap, are 15-year-old Brianna and Gordon.

By: CAROLYN CHUTE | November 14, 2008

Here comes the sun

It's All Right
It's All Right

By: JIM SULLIVAN | November 14, 2008

Leviathan

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 may be the Great American Novel
Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That's a fair description of Roberto Bolaño's last work, the 912-page opus 2666 .

By: PETER KEOUGH | November 11, 2008

Interview: Art Spiegelman

Drawing conclusions
"When you don't understand a painting, you assume you're stupid. When you don't understand a cartoon, you assume the cartoonist is stupid."

By: MIKE MILIARD | November 13, 2008

Table of content

Jim Harrison’s road trip
Jim Harrison’s fiction and essays are built from his particular blend of earthiness and erudition.

By: BILL BEUTTLER | October 28, 2008

Beating a dead horse

An excerpt from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
I got home about 3:45 after eating breakfast at Riker’s on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue

By: JACK KEROUAC AND WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS | October 22, 2008

Back Beat

At last, Kerouac and Burroughs's co-authored noir novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, resurfaces.
On a Sunday afternoon in December of 1997 I hooked up with the poet Jim McCrary at a Greenwich Village saloon.

By: GEORGE KIMBALL | October 24, 2008

Scarlet letters

The uptight killjoy in us
Sarah Vowell’s fifth book, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead) — released on October 7 — examines New England Puritans with a meticulously researched, critical-yet-comical eye.

By: CAITLIN E. CURRAN | October 09, 2008

A smoker’s tale

Will Self’s The Butt
Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books.

By: JAMES PARKER | November 26, 2008

Pilgrims’ progress

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
India, 1838. The opium business is booming, and drug money fills the British Empire’s coffers, offsetting a trade imbalance created by imports of Chinese tea and silk. But now the emperor wants the drug trade stopped.

By: CHRIS WANGLER | October 08, 2008

Interview: John Hodgman

One man's operating system
Long before John Hodgman became universally recognized as the systems-challenged PC in Apple’s ads, he was writing fake trivia for such publications as McSweeney’s and the New York Times Magazine.

By: CLEA SIMON | November 21, 2008

Ghost writer

The haunted world of Kelly Link
Salted throughout Kelly Link’s stories, you’ll find Buffy , Bust , Doc Martens, IM-ing, Target, Google, Vicks VapoRub, a T-shirt that reads I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES.

By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN | October 02, 2008

Hit men

George Kimball's Four Kings KO's the last golden era of boxing
At least one passage in Four Kings will get George Kimball cursed out in local bars.

By: MARK JURKOWITZ | October 02, 2008

Interview: Dennis Lehane

Mystic River author's new The Given Day gets down and dirty in the North End circa WWI
Dennis Lehane’s big new book, The Given Day , is full of bloodshed, mayhem, power, corruption, and lies.

By: JIM SULLIVAN | September 25, 2008

Literary import

Ploughshares lands a new editor
One of the first things Ladette Randolph tells me is that she’s a fifth-generation Nebraskan, that her great-great grandparents settled there, that the landscape there, particularly in the western part of the state, where her novel is set, is “like being in the middle of the ocean — that kind of erasure.”

By: NINA MACLAUGHLIN | September 24, 2008

More different than alike

Searching for national identity in State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration (WPA).

By: MIKE MILIARD | September 24, 2008

Thanaphobe

Julian Barnes considers the abyss
Novelist Julian Barnes is a brilliant writer, but he’s not self-revelatory.

By: AMY FINCH | December 22, 2008

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