Essays

E-books have been getting a lot of press recently. But why you would want to pay $400 for something no smaller, no lighter, and no easier to read than a paperback?

Retro-noir fiction makes a comeback, courtesy of the Hard Case Crime imprint.

Neale Donald Walsch victimized by his own brain, Joshua Casteel on his opposition to the war, Macmillen facetiously explains how books are published, and video of Whitman reading his work.

How will John Updike’s writing measure up twenty years from now?

The talk-show host recurses into himself, courtesy of Lawrence Lessig.

Mark Doty, Billy Collins, and Robert Pinsky get excited about a Thomas Hardy poem, plus CAPTCHA poetry, classifying profanity, and more.

I’d put up $20 that one of these six books will make the NYT Best Books of 2009.

Kimberly Johnson, Alex Lemon, and Brenda Shaughnessy take up the poetics of God-lust with renewed, edgy, often darkly humorous imagination in distinctive second books of poetry.

Recently, I came across a photo on the web of prisoners in Guantánamo. You know the one: shot at close range through a chain-link fence, we see a line of detainees in orange jumpsuits—hooded, hands tied, bent over and broken. They are the...

“Angel at the Fence” again raises the question of the rules of memoir.