An interview with Peter Matthiessen.

The author remembers his stepfather, E.B. White.

The decade-long journey of a novel–Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding–through the unpredictable world of book publishing.

“But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.”

A profile of the internet’s poet, Patricia Lockwood.

On Edward St. Aubyn’s autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels.

An inventive spoof on childhood mystery novels.

"Almanac's father fell face forward onto the concrete garage floor, dead, blood pooling beneath him, and ending Almanac's childhood right then and there."

How CREW and MUSTIE decide what books stay in a library's circulation.

The writings of Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik are a copy-and-paste hodgepodge of “jeremiads against the scourge of cultural theory, lists of atrocities perpetuated by Muslims, and pages of derision of ‘female sluts,’ but also Wikipedia articles about sugar beet farming and investment tips.”

The life and mysterious death of dissident Bulgarian writer and radio journalist Georgi Markov.

“A story is a kind of biopsy of human life.”

A young writer grows up with Alice Munro.

Is a well-received work of William Faulkner scholarship a hoax?

Did Thomas Pynchon write a series of letters to Northern California newspapers under the pseudonym “Wanda Tinasky”?

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, on crying in movie theaters, “attention whores” and David Foster Wallace.

The downside of opening up.

Stolen time with the writer as he neared the end.

A local reporter set out to profile the celebrated writer. He ended up lampooned in The New Yorker.

Excerpted from Updike.

“There was this brief moment when people who wrote blogs also cared about so-called literary fiction. Now it seems they’ve moved on. My doctor doesn’t give a fuck.”

An interview with Philip Roth on his career, his critics, and his retirement, which he began by re-reading his 31 books to "see whether I’d wasted my time."

More from the Longform archive: writers on writing.

W.H. Auden’s quiet, personal pursuit of kindness and honor.

An illustrated codex, hand-composed in an unknown writing system.

“I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own ­aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know ­whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.”

What accounts for the gender gap in literary criticism?