Alice Munro

Earlier this year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a 100-book required reading list for his compatriots, it provoked anxiety, rekindling memories of Soviet-era censorship. The furor underscored an important point: that literature plays a...

-------------------- Farther Away Essays Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 322 pp., $26 -------------------- I didn't much like Jonathan Franzen's essay "Farther Away" when I read it a year ago in the New Yorker. A complicated mishmash of a...

One of America’s leading novelists will spend time on the Centre College campus, reading from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Olive Kitteridge,” and giving a class at the college library. Elizabeth Strout’s award-winning...

Downtown Women's Center store: The Downtown Women's Center's store Made is expanding its reach, selling soy candles, soaps, travel bags and other handmade gifts not only from its Skid Row storefront but also through Bloomingdales and the Skirball Cultural...

Binocular Vision New & Selected Stories Edith Pearlman Lookout Books: 374 pp., $18.95 paper I'll confess: I had never heard of Edith Pearlman before reading "Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories," a collection of 34 pieces of her short fiction...

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Doubleday) A struggling young writer in 1920s Barcelona accepts a lucrative, diabolical assignment commissioned by a shadowy client. The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster) Meet Paul Chowder, a poet,...

Judd Apatow has edited an anthology titled "I Found This Funny," coming out Nov. 1, which benefits 826 National. It's kind of a funny humor anthology because some of its stories aren't funny at all. Yes, it includes pieces by......

The opening episodes of 'The Killing' gain power from taking their time, says this recap....

A judge withdraws from the Man Booker International Prize jury when the award goes to Philip Roth. "He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book," she says. "It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe.".....

Not a short story, not quite a novella — wasn't that a Britney Spears song? — the oxymoronic long short story is an underemployed literary form. (For argument's sake, let's say the long short story ranges from 30 to 60 pages.) F. Scott...

To anyone who has encountered New Yorkers' maddeningly internalized sense of superiority about their place of residence, a hubris perhaps best expressed in Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker magazine cover, "View of the World from 9th Avenue," here is a...