A moment of racism at Harvard leads the writer to consider Huckleberry Finn.

The men whose profitable (and self-serving) antics preserved what we know of the Brontë sisters.

On the sex lives of the castrati.

The adventures and controversies of the avant-garde poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who believes plagiarism is an art form.

Hemingway was in love with two women at once. He found the experience wrenching.

He had the mind of a scholar, but he always insisted he didn’t want to be one.

In which Eliot analyzes Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence.

The longtime editor of the London Review of Books on editing, the “fussed” people on Twitter, and “preferential treament” for women.

The life and politics of Joan Didion.

The poet died when he was hit by a car in 1965. Everything else about his demise is a mystery.

An accidental evening with Yeats, in the spring of 1937.

The baseball game that launched a career in fiction.

“I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

A trip to the Famous Poets Society convention/contest in Reno.

“It’s an old book!” Harper Lee told a mutual friend of ours who’d seen her while I was in Monroeville. “But if someone wants to read it, fine!”

An essay on motivation.

“I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own ­aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know ­whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.”

On literary mashups, double entendres, and questionable choices.

"Maybe you’ve heard of M__y Dick? I would bet you haven’t read it, and I bet I’d win that bet because I’d be leaving nothing up to chance. Here’s why: nobody has read M__y Dick. Scratch that. Nobody but me has read M__y Dick, because there’s only one copy in existence and it’s right here in my apartment, right here on this very desk I am writing to you from. That was the whole point. M__y Dick was just for me, for my own self-improvement. Of course, that didn’t stop them from talking about it, which was fine at first, and then it was not."

On the power of youth literature.

“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment.”

In the Swiss town of Meiringen, where an obsessed group of ‘pilgrims’ painstakingly recreate the death of Sherlock Holmes.

Browsing the stacks with The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda.

On hypochondria.

I can’t ask anything. Once in a while if I’m forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it’s usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who’s allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don’t trust it.

On a biography of David Foster Wallace.