A clue-filled children’s book, a golden hare, and Britain’s greatest treasure hunt.

Retro, apocalypticism, and our “culture of disaster.”

How the fatwa changed his life.

INTERVIEWER: You once said the novel is dead. VIDAL: That was a joke.

His book panned in the New York Times after being misread by the critic, an author responds.

On collecting books.

I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realised there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a reader's head.

Growing up with Charlie Brown.

How Google’s utopian/dystopian plan to scan the world’s books failed and the Harvard-led team that’s picking up the pieces.

Uncovered letters reveal ties between the literary magazine and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.

“I didn’t realize who my father was. So it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. I wasn’t there believing that I was receiving genius from on high. My father was my father.”

Inside the Quidditch World Cup.

A profile of Maurice Sendak.

On “Poor Hartley,” the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The author of Truly Tasteless Jokes unmasks herself.

A profile of the eccentric Gene Weingarten, the only person to twice win the Pulitzer for feature writing.

On a Victorian-era murder case, and the novel it inspired.

A profile of Robert Caro, who’s been working on a biography on Lyndon Johnson for nearly 40 years.

A literary exploration of Obama’s voice.

This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoken words on the page with considerable misgivings . . . indeed, what follows can be considered an interview conducted with himself, by himself.

Jimmy McNulty, Mike Daisey, and the problems with skirting the system to get to the greater truth.

Fact-checking David Sedaris.

A profile of thriller writer Harlan Coben and what it takes to succeed as a novelist even when the literary establishment doesn’t acknowledge your existence.

An analysis of Dr. Seuss’ literature.

A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home:

The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself.

On New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow’s descent into madness.