Campaign for the American Reader

Did Giuliani really begin reading a biography of Churchill at 2:30 a.m. the night after the 9/11 attacks? So he says. Gripped as he was by t...

When he is not advising the blog on Australian cultural issues , Friend of the Blog "Dutch" is a diplomat in the service of a majo...

Looking for a schema with which to evaluate your favorite books? Try William T. Vollmann's. First, consider his key: A = Perfect Languag...

The latest installment in Jane Smiley's series is T.H. White's Arthurian cycle. T.H. White's The Once and Future King is steep...

Some weeks ago I asked: Do women deserve a book prize of their own? The folks at the Orange prize clearly think they do, and Zadie Smith won...

Didn't get enough Harper Lee news with yesterday's post on the Jane Austen of south Alabama ? Then check out the Salon review of C...

The last two years have not been all that kind to Tom Wolfe. Sure, he sold (literally, many) tons of his latest (2.4 lb.) book. And he had s...

Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird is such a popular favorite that every six months or so some related event summons it forth in pop cu...

Regular visitors to the blog know I'm interested in twice-told tales--stories that owe a strong debt to earlier, usually famous, stories...

In a featured blurb for Thomas Perry 's Nightlife , Stephen King writes: "I can't imagine any reader finishing this and thinkin...

I've praised Kate Atkinson's Case Histories as my favorite novel of 2004 . And her top 10 novels? 1. The Great Gatsby by F Scott...

My favorite novel of 2004 was Kate Atkinson's Case Histories . The publisher's summary does not do justice to the book but click her...

What happens when partisans of The Great Illinois Novel run into supporters of The Great Florida Novel ? Click here for the whole bloody s...

Ron Moore, the creator and executive producer of the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica series, lists five of his favorite science f...

In an earlier post I wrote: I don't race through an Updike novel--because I too often stop to reread a page or paragraph, to marvel at ...

By the time you read this my friend, Candice, will be dead. We've been friends, members of the same writers' workshop, since 1990, r...

"THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard." So opens Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), subject of the latest insta...

So Ron Howard, director of The Da Vinci Code , sometimes goes a little too heavy with the score in his films. Still, it's hard to think ...

James Webb , former secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration and author of eight books including a novel about the Vietnam War...

There's an interesting review essay about a sub-genre of travel writing called "loiterature" in the Financial Times by Profes...