“Anytime I was called a New Journalist I winced a little with embarrassment.”

On Bob Woodward’s “rather eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him.”

“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”

How a cabal of authors profited by gaming Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited algorithm.

On the unlikely friendship between Nelson Algren and the young writer during the final years of Algren’s life.

It was June of 1980 when Nelson called me breathlessly from the highway.

He wants you to know one thing: He’s not even angry.

How the godfather of “fratire” went from chronicling his drunken sexual conquests to ghostwriting Tiffany Haddish’s memoir.

On the work of Rachel Cusk.

An interview with Maurice Sendak.

The author faces this question as she emerges from alcoholism.

A major black novelist made a remarkable début. How did he disappear?

On Joan Didion.

Teaching Emily Dickinson at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida.

On Graham Greene, the master of “ethical ambivalence.”

When she died in 1952, author Margaret Wise Brown left the rights to Goodnight Moon to a nine-year-old neighbor named Albert Clarke. The book became a classic. Clarke, living entirely off the royalties, became a deadbeat.

Inside the New York Public Library’s archives.

A profile of Ernest Hemingway.

A profile of the writer.

Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social-media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons — sometimes before anybody’s even read them.

Steidl, who is sixty-six, is known for fanatical attention to detail, for superlative craftsmanship, and for embracing the best that technology has to offer. "He is so much better than anyone,” William Eggleston, the American color photographer, told me, when I met him recently in New York. Steidl has published Eggleston for a decade; two years ago, he produced an expanded, ten-volume, boxed edition of “The Democratic Forest,” the artist’s monumental 1989 work. Eggleston passed his hand through the air, in a stroking gesture. “Feel the pages of the books,” he said. “The ink is in relief. It is that thick.”

"I’m not familiar with books on style. My role in the revival of Strunk’s book was a fluke—just something I took on because I was not doing anything else at the time. It cost me a year out of my life, so little did I know about grammar."

The relationship between creative writing programs and modern fiction.

The story of The Anarchist Cookbook and why its creator, William Powell, regrets writing the book.

Ahmed Naji’s novel was not overtly political, but the “protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka” which led a lawyer to press charges against him for causing a fluctuation in his blood pressure when the novel was excerpted in a Cairo newspaper, even though it had been approved by censors.