Essays

Book covers do matter. There’s a whole blog dedicated to the topic.

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.

In 1827, Thomas de Quincey suggested that murder was becoming a new medium for the artist: “People begin to see,” he wrote, “that something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife...

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...