An interview on craft.

Parsing the lives of middle-class twentysomethings.

“For people who pay close attention to the state of American fiction, he has become a kind of superhero.”

The life and work of Nelson Algren.

A meditation on Hell.

“Oh God, everybody hates Jane Austen. They don’t have the balls to say it.”

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.

After being caught in a downpour, a traveler takes refuge in the home of a twisted old man; Happy Halloween.

"As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened."

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.

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.

The author ("media inventor" Robin Sloan) describes this as a "short story about recession, attraction, and data visualization."

"That night, at the bookstore, I started working on the new visualization, thinking I could impress Kat with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype."

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.”