David Foster Wallace

Well, this would explain my $25,000 tax bill. Looks like I picked the wrong year to start up a right-wing militia group. I called it “Tim’s Teas,” and well, who knew? I swear, we were simply a “social welfare”...

Well, this would explain my $25,000 tax bill. Looks like I picked the wrong year to start up a right-wing militia group. I called it “Tim’s Teas,” and well, who knew? I swear, we were simply a “social welfare” organization...

No two readers are alike. No two mothers are alike. And the only way to really find out what might be a good book to get your mother for Mother’s Day is to ask her what she likes to read. My own mother’s reading habits have always been a bit...

On his show Thursday night, Stephen Colbert hosted a book club with distinct Oprah-like overtones: cozy chairs, yellow pillows, a pastel tie and chardonnay. The book at hand was F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." To discuss the novel, he...

Happy birthday to Thomas Pynchon! The reclusive author  of "Gravity's Rainbow," "The Crying of Lot 49," "Mason & Dixon" and more turns 76 today. Unlike the attention-seekers that clog our cultural aqueduct, Pynchon isn't likely to show up on CNN or NPR....

When I got my reviewer's copy of Bill Walsh's new book, Yes I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk (St. Martin's Griffin, 256 pages, $14.99), the book fell open to this passage: "You're free to talk back to your usage guides....

This post has been updated. See below for details. An infinite jest, Chicago lyricist Chance the Rapper's stellar new mixtape "Acid Rap" begins with a woman's seductive voice -- chanteuse Lili K. -- uttering, "Even better than I was the last time, baby,...

The Pulitzer Prize in fiction, announced Monday, has been awarded to Adam Johnson for his book set in North Korea, "The Orphan Master's Son." The committee described the book as "an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome...

I recently read David Quammen's "Spillover," a scary, brilliant book about zoonotic diseases. Quammen is a marvelous stylist. But I was dismayed to discover, on page 506, this sentence: "One of the things that makes influenza so problematic, Webster said,...

Singer/guitarist Marnie Stern's evaluation of her discography sounds a bit like Goldilocks reviewing porridge. "With the first record I thought, 'Oh, it's too experimental,'" she said. "With the second record I thought, 'Oh, it's too rock.' With the...

Renata Adler has won renown during her years as a staff writer for The New Yorker and film critic for the New York Times. Though her political and arts criticism has been deeply divisive at times, she remains a powerful force in the literary world. Adler'...

Sometimes I wonder how many books I've read in my four decades. Thousands, anyway — maybe tens of thousands — since the first one, about a choo-choo, when I was not quite 3. Right up to Anne Carson's “Autobiography of Red,”...