John Updike

At the end of the calendar year, bookstores are swamped with anthologies proclaiming the "best of" writing of the year. There is, apparently, a lot of really good writing: above is just a sample of the galleys and paperbacks that......

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison turns 80 today, Feb 18....

Five literary treats that will last through 2011: free short stories, a new app, near-extinct words and author interviews form the Paris Review....

 Here’s something we didn’t know about Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam: The laudably bearded former film professor and father of five is actually one of the suavest sex jam singers of recent note. True, the moments of baby-making R&B......

"We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century." Edited by Robert Fox. The Overlook Press. $30. This book is a collection of stories from people who escaped the Titanic, fought in the trenches, spent hard time in prison camps, met the...

"The Pale King" is composed of parts of the "something long" on which 46-year-old David Foster Wallace was working before he hanged himself at his home in Claremont on Sept. 12, 2008. Wallace — author of fictions such as "The Broom of the System,"...

"The Art Student's War" By Brad Leithauser Knopf, 512 pages, $27.95 To engage in some literary hopscotch momentarily, consider that the poet and novelist Brad Leithauser, writing in Slate magazine on John Updike, connected his subject with Henry James'...

Yellow shoes are the only giveaway. Without them, Steve Martin's just another New Yorker in a somber gray coat, braced against the coming winter, out Christmas shopping for his wife; just another writer with a new book he will see in the window of...

Not that long ago, e-books were an oddity: Devices were expensive, and those who invested in them struggled to find something good to read. But the age of preferring paperbacks is starting to look like the late era of CDs — e-books are ascendant....

Inspired by Salinger's toilet -- which was listed for sale on EBay for $1 million -- Jacket Copy decided to see what other literary-ish items are currently for sale on the site. What we discovered? The doozy dozen. The first......

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace David Lipsky Broadway: 352 pp., $16.99 paper David Foster Wallace dispenses exactly three pieces of writing advice in "Although of Course You End Up Becoming...

Alan Sillitoe, now in his 80s, grew up in Nottingham, in the English midlands, in the kind of squalor and poverty that, a century earlier, gave Charles Dickens nightmares. Sillitoe's father was a violent drunk; his mother, on occasion, was forced to...