Late in a career marked by both triumph and tragedy, the author has written a new book exploring the unsettling case of Emmett Till’s father — and the isolation of black men in America.

A visit with John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing, which “changed the way at least two generations responded to art,” just before his death.

All of the books about all of the David Bowies:

There are more and more books like this these days: rock histories and encyclopedias, stuffed with information, compendiums of every last detail from this or that year, era, genre, artist – time pinned down, with absolutely no anxiety of influence. And while it would be churlish to deny there is often a huge amount of valuable stuff in them, I do think we need to question how seriously we want to take certain lives and kinds of art – and how we take them seriously without self-referencing the life out of them, without deadening the very things that constitute their once bright, now frazzled eros and ethos.

“We take it that all young writers overestimate their work. It’s impossible not to—I mean if you recognized what shit you were writing, you wouldn’t write it. You have to believe in your stuff—every day has to be the new day on which the new poem may be it.”

"His friends remembered when Richard became famous. It was the year the hippies came to San Francisco. Richard had published one novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur, but it had sold miserably 743 copies and his publisher, Grove Press, had dropped its option on Trout Fishing in America."

David Roberts spent his life facing death in the mountains. Now he is facing a fatal prognosis.

On Elena Ferrante:

Different names, every time, but the reaction is the same: a momentary light in the listener’s eyes that fades to bored disappointment. An Italian woman from Naples, whose name you wouldn’t know. Who did you expect?

The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister.

The author on Lolita, his work habits, and what he expected from his literary afterlife.

Jacqueline Kennedy, William Manchester, and the battle over the authorized account of J.F.K.’s assassination.

A profile of Martha Nussbaum, whose ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life—aging, inequality, and emotion.

Four dispatches from the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

Riding through Detroit with the author of The Turner House.

An interview with the novelist.

On the chaotic letters of journalist and Dr. Strangelove screenwriter Terry Southern.

As an “angry young man,” Ghost World author Daniel Clowes insulted Stan Lee and Art Spiegelman in a graphic novel’s satirical alternate reality. It was born from a nagging self-doubt that, despite the cartoonist’s current recognition and status, lingers.

On George Plimpton and the founders of The Paris Review.

Memories of living with the writer Andrew Lytle late in his life.

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

Although she is one of the richest writers in the country, her finances are a mess.

Creating – and revising – the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

What it’s like to have your novel filmed by Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski.

The “insane playfulness, deliberate infantilism, nutty haikus, naked stripteases, free-form chants and literary war dances of the beats” and their leader.

On the mysteries of the man behind Alice in Wonderland.