Campaign for the American Reader

Earlier this month, in the final game of the 2006 World Cup, France's attacking midfielder Zine dine Zidane took exception to a verbal p...

The novelist Joanna Briscoe shared her " Ten Best Beach reads " with the Independent . I haven't read the majority of her choi...

I checked in with Chris Nolan of " Spot-On " for a title for our series on what's at stake in the debate over habeas corpus ....

There is a terrific article by Gordon Burn in The Guardian about the echoes of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer in Richard Ford's The ...

David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst and the forthcoming Andrew Carnegie , suggested five top biographies o...

Sometime in the 1990s I joined Francis Fukuyama and a senior international relations scholar for lunch. Fukuyama was then best known for hi...

Percy Bysshe Shelley is mainly remembered as a romantic poet. Yet a newly discovered poem underscores his reputation as a radical writer--he...

Via " Pete Lit " (see here and here ) I've learned of a brand new blog developed by Sara Paretsky and some of her fellow Chic...

What better opportunity to applaud Adam Gopnik 's Paris to the Moon than Bastille Day, the French national holiday commemorating the Fê...

I received many helpful suggestions in the quest for good fiction that demonstrates what's at stake in the debate over habeas corpus . ...

NOTE: updated August 20, 2006 At the end of March 2006 I issued a call for fiction that might help American citizens understand and apprecia...

Joan Acocella has a very interesting essay about Stefan Zweig in The New York Review of Books . In the 1920s and 1930s Stefan Zweig was an ...

Two of my favorite early contributions to the blog are Bry an Curtis' and Don Graham's takes on The Great Texas Novel . So what...

Louise Welsh has made a bigger name for herself at home in the British Isles than here in the United States. Which is a pity for American re...

Access Foundation has made available online a large collection of so-called "Great Books." Click here to learn about the Great B...

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was published one hundred years ago, an anniversary cele brated by a new Penguin edition. In Slate Karen O...

Louis Auchincloss named his five best novellas for O pinion Journal . Number one: "Madame de Treymes" by Edith Wharton (Scribner...

The Guardian 's series of excerpts from Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel closes with an entry on Toni Morrison...

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own," writes Anna Quindlen in How Reading Changed My Life . ...

Everyone loves Raymond Chandler (don't they?). But Chandler didn't love everyone. Take James M. Cain: Everything he touches smells l...