Why do all those rugged coastlines, moors and stone buildings make England seem haunted?

Before The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen was just another literary novelist with a new book coming out.

David Simon and Richard Price, two of the greatest crime storytellers of our time, talk about their craft.

Joseph Mitchell used composites in his non-fiction, invented characters and added flourishes to his facts. Does it matter?

Kamel Daoud’s celebrated retelling of Albert Camus’s The Stranger came within two votes of winning the Prix Goncourt. It has also made him a target of radical Islamists.

Many people hoped that this would be the second book she’d publish.

Being friends with Susan Sontag was thrilling, but also “shot through in the end with mutual irritation.”

Academics are convinced it’s an intelligent satire.

The writer Alfred Chester, who died alone in a Jerusalem apartment in 1971 at just 37, was brilliant. He was also insane.

A correspondence school for writers turns out to be a sham. This piece forced it into bankruptcy.

A 58-year-old manuscript will become Harper Lee’s second novel, but questions about Lee’s care continue to swirl in Alabama.

She was not just a poet, she was an “event” in American literature all by herself.

A journalist and documentarian charts over a decade of her relationship with Philip Roth.

How Harper Lee was duped into signing away the rights to To Kill a Mockingbird, which still sells 750,000 copies per year, and how she’s fighting to get them back.

Alex Malarkey co-wrote a bestselling book about a near-death experience. Last week he admitted he made it up. Why wasn’t anyone listening to a quadriplegic boy and a mother who simply wanted to tell the truth?

An American writer living in Japan, unread and underpublished, sends an email to a group of writers he doesn’t know informing them that he is committing suicide.

Merriam-Webster is revising its most authoritative tome for the digital age. But in an era of twerking and trolling, what should a dictionary look like?

Since exposing the Neapolitan mafia by publishing Gomorrah at age 27, Roberto Saviano has lived for nearly a decade under armed guard, shuttling between anonymous hotels and army barracks.

An interview with the novelist, who died on Saturday.

Michel Houellebecq on his controversial new novel, Submission, which imagines France electing its first Muslim president.

The best-selling young novelist lay dead in a trash-strewn cottage on Ireland’s rugged coast for over a week before she was discovered.

How the author writes best-selling non-fiction books without the ability to leave her house.

On spectacular saintliness, holy anorexia, and female hysteria.

On Cheryl Strayed and why Wild became a hit.

The short-lived literary career of Breece DʼJ Pancake and his roadmap to a world of oppressive poverty.