Sweet Valley High and the enduring economic power of blond twins.

The art of shaping a magazine article.

A profile of novelist Jennifer Weiner.

“Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans.”

The incentives for and ethics of writing other people’s books.

In 1902, a poet attempts to stage the world’s first “perfume concert.”

After circulating Lolita in secret amongst a small circle of New Yorker editors and publishers, Vladamir Nabokov finally placed it at Olympia Press. Three weeks before publication, a slumping and broke Dorothy Parker appeared in The New Yorker with a story entitled “Lolita” about a teenage bride, her jealous mother, and a much older man.

INTERVIEWER: I imagine that people try to set you up as some sort of guru, whether political or metaphysical.

LESSING: I think people are always looking for gurus. It’s the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It’s quite terrifying.

On interviewing and napping beside Norman Mailer.

“I mean, writers are horribly envious and so nobody likes stars, we always feel like it’s a zero-sum game and whatever stardom somebody else has is being taken directly from us, so we hate the stars. But we also need them. Because the possibility of some level of stardom is what will continue to attract new writers to the game. If you’re a linguistically talented 22-year-old, there’s a list of things you can be: you can work in Hollywood, you can be a blogger, etc. And if being a novelist equates to some quaint thing like being a Morris dancer, who’s going to choose this?”

The authors spend time in Concord, Mass., with people who impersonate Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

An analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Cotton Tenants, the original manuscript.

“I think I knew that at heart I was an aging spinster.”

An interview with the literary agent about the state of the book industry and how, at least for him, it continues to be quite lucrative.

A literary memoir.

On Ron Latimer, the strange, elusive publisher of great poets, including Wallace Stevens.

How Norman Mailer and other writers wanted to go out.

A profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, whose bestselling memoir may have sunk her literary career.

On dirty laundry and the meaning of freedom.

An interview with novelist Marilynne Robinson, conducted by a graduating student.

A profile of Cormac McCarthy–on the verge of fame.

“Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a ‘classicist’; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.”

The life, work, and early death of writer Shirley Jackson.

An interview on craft.

Inside a family of novelists.