Barnes & Noble Review officially publishes my review of Blake Bailey’s excellent new Cheever: A Life on Thursday, but I have the go-ahead to link now. John Updike, in his last-ever piece of book criticism, characterized the biography as a “heavy, dispiriting,” and dull read, b...

In 1842, Edgar Allan Poe got so drunk on mint juleps while visiting New York that he sent a letter apologizing to publishers J. and H.G. Langley. Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behavior while in N-York? You must have conceived a queer idea of me – but th...

When I and some friends reconnected with our senior-year high school English teacher at Facebook, he posted our syllabus — amazing to see after all this time. Listed there was “Noon Wine,” the story that served as my introduction to Katherine Anne Porter, and it reminded me of the ...

“Rhys had a brief career in prostitution and also worked as a chorus girl.” Lillian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour, a life of writer Jean Rhys, is out 4/29....

When Muriel Spark died a few years ago, writer Katharine Weber implored me to go beyond the works I’d already read and admired — The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Finishing School — to Spark’s “utterly sublime first novel, The Comforters, written to save herself fro...

Experts debate age and authenticity of a newly-found Bible written in a dialect of Jesus’ native language. (Via.)...

Bookslut discusses alinear and disjunctive storytelling with Jesse Ball, whose The Way Through Doors is just out....

Granta’s Fathers issue includes nine writers’ recollections of their fathers. For Granta.com, the magazine has invited newer writers, including Jim Shepard, Gary Shteyngart, Rabih Alameddine, and me, to reflect on a photo of their dad. My contribution is up today; here’s the first ...

I once joked that I was suffering from a case of literary blue balls when I bought an issue of a magazine after enjoying an online excerpt of a Saïd Sayrafiezadeh story that ended with the line “‘My cock feels full with the thought of you in my heart.’” Only when my cred...

Amid all the discussion of massive layoffs and restructuring in publishing, I keep hoping someone will take a detailed look at how books fared during the Great Depression, and consider how the current economic crisis compares. Conventional wisdom holds that books have done well in hard times, becaus...