The Centre Cannot Hold: Outsiders in the
Literary Mainstream
Stanley Fish's New-Old Milton Book
The Difference Between Reading for Pleasure and Reading
for Review
Double Lives of the Biographical Classes
Peter Owen: Publisher with a Nose for
Brilliant Novels
In Praise of Girls' Books
A Writer's Best Revenge
Helen
Simpson's Tales of Tough Love
Where Historians, Authors Part
Literary World Strikes Gold with Historical
Fiction
Plather: New books on Sylvia and Ted
Justice to J.D. Salinger
Hobbit Forming
Lord of the Geeks
The Book of the Century
Seamus Heaney on W.B. Yeats
Novelist Haruki Murakami's Bizarre, Trip-Inducing
World
The Dark Secrets of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Short Story: The Half-Skinned Steer by E. Annie
Proulx
A Coversation with E. Annie Proulx
Outcry over 'Prostitution' of C.S. Lewis
David Lodge's Triumphant Return to Academic Fiction
The Last Gentleman: Remembering Richard Yates
John Donne: Passionate Poet and Chaser of Skirts
Shakespeare: The Real Man Behind the Myths
The Strange Chemistry That Makes Literary Festivals So Alluring
What Good is Literature?
Kicking the Hobbit
The No-Book Report
The Artist Who Talked to Angels
Another Life of RLS
Nick Hornby's Bitingly Clever Novel of Ideas
The Real Portrait of William Shakespeare?
A Portrait of the Artist as Apprentice
Fiction or Non-Fiction?
Everyone's a Critic
Guardian Profile of Latin Master Carlos Fuentes
Indian Novelist R. K. Narayan Dies at 94: BBC Report, CNN Report, The Man Who Invented Malgudi, The Times Obit, Daily Telegraph Obit
R.K.Narayan: A Brief Profile, Critical Appreciation,
Graham Greene and R.K. Narayan
'My America', an Essay by R. K. Narayan
Lament for Douglas by Richard Dawkins, Douglas Adams: Universal Tourist with a Classic in his Luggage
'Why Literature?: The Premature Obituary of the Book' by Mario Vargas Llosa
Love in the Ruins: Another Review of 'The Dying Animal' by Philip Roth
The Realm of Senses: Review of 'The Dying Animal' by Philip Roth
'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde
Prufrock O' Prufrock: Observations on Eliot's 'Love Song'
Chapter One of 'Washington' by Meg Greenfield
Chapter One of 'The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier' by Thad Carhart
Chapter One of 'The Queen's Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr. John Dee, Advisor to Queen Elizabeth I' by Benjamin Woolley
Chapter One of 'The Hero's Walk' by Anita Rau Badami
The Life of Hans Christian Andersen Was No Fairy Tale
Anne Tyler's Breathtaking Fifteenth Novel
Orwell for Our Time
Excerpt
from 'The Prologue' to 'A Man in Full' by Tom Wolfe
Excerpt from Chapter 2 ('The Saddlebags') of 'A Man in Full' by Tom Wolfe
Excerpt from 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' by Salman Rushdie
Robert Frost: Once By the Pacific
'Jews Without Money': A Timely Classic
The Book of Our Century: James Joyce's 'Ulysses'
John Updike on Blake's Dream
James's Ellroy's Bark is Worse Than His Bite
What Lyn Hejinian's Poetry Tells Us About Chance, Fortune, and Pleasure
1800 Days in the Hole: 'Angry Harvest' Revisited
Death in Sudan
Telling Stories: The Books that Change Our Lives
James Wood on John Updike
A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
Martin Amis: The Mick Jagger of Fiction
Chapter One of 'A Painted House' by John Grisham
Poem: 'The Return' by Philip Levine
Profile of 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' author Louis de Bernières
The Moon in June: Lunar Symbolism in Poetry
Ideas for Experiments in Poetry Writing
Textual Politics and the Language Poets
The Continuity of American Language Poetry
Poetics, Polemic, and the Question of Intelligibility
I=N=C=O=H=E=R=E=N=T: Meaninglessness As a Thing of Beauty in Poetry
Silence of the Iambs: On the Prosing of Poetry
Chekhov's Early, Experimental Stories
Henry Green: Invisible Man
How Contemporary American Poets are Denaturing the Poem, Part III
Paul Theroux Creates a Riotous Culture Clash in 'Hotel Honolulu'
Great Moments in the History of Rejection
Mary, Mary Quite Contrary
Death in Venice
So Many Important Literary Works, So Little Time to Read
Accuracy: A Novel Notion in Historical Novels?
The Fictional Memoirs of Pontius Pilate
The Cowboy Poet and the End of the West
The Unabashed and Prolific Daniel Defoe
Wounded by Un-Shrapnel: Truth and Transience in the Poetry of Philip Larkin
An Unsure Effort to Rescue the Reputation of Carson McCullers
Diana Athill: An Editor Has Her Say
Review of 'Birthday' by Alan Sillitoe
Review of 'Five Quarters Of The Orange' by Joanne Harris
'Harry Potter' Crew Sues Author Who Says Her Ideas Were Lifted, Plagiarize and Be Damned
Ayn 'Rant' as Boring as Airline Food
'Why Japan?' by William Gibson
Pat Barker: Young Lives Between the Lines
Arundhati Roy: The Progressive Interview
The Elusiveness of Doris Lessing
Battling Banality by Martin Amis
Norman Mailer: A Literary Lion Roars
Madness, Creativity and Human Nature
Jean-Arthur Rimbaud: Poet Who Lives on As an Enigma
The Drowned and the Unsaved
The Classics As a Foundation for Contemporary Literature
Homo Scriblerus by Frank Kermode
Waiting for Godoff: Profile of Random House's New President
Harold Pinter: The Progressive Interview
Marriage Made in Heaven
'Finnegans Wake' Breakdown
What Role Should Experimental Fiction Fill?
The Story of English Poetry
Chester Himes: A Misfit Writer Who Reinvented the Mystery Genre
Sparkling Essays That Trace a Writer's Life
Chapter One of 'The Death of Vishnu' by Manil Suri
Philip Roth's Vision of Paradise Lost
W.H. Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare
Gatsby of the Boulevards
The last Elizabethan: Hart Crane at 100
Fiction: 'The Mad Goddess of Truth' by Kaveri Nambisan
Interview with Indian Poet Sunil Gangopdhyay
Most People's First Novels are Not Their Best
From the Continent of Lost Stories
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye's African Fiction
Laurence Sterne: An Odd But Consistently Endearing Writer
PD James Talks about Her Latest Novel, 'Death in Holy Orders'
When Authors Attack
A Critical Study of Five Travel Writers
No Lawyers and Blacks in John Grisham's New Novel about the South
James Merrill: A Poet of Love and Loss
Chapter One of 'A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson' by Alison Lurie
How James Merrill Came of Age
'The Making of a Writer: Condemned to Write About Real Things' by James Merrill
The Importance of Posing as Oscar
Why You Can't Trust Book Reviews
Introduction and Four Poems by Rainer Maria von Rilke
James Boswell's Life of a 'Life'
James Wood Examines John Carey's Anti-Modernist Selection of 'Enjoyable Books'
Maestro of the Middle East: Profile of Lebanese WriterAmin Maalouf
Are There Gender Differences in Writing?
Writers in a Cold Wind Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System
Magic, Mystery, and Mayhem: An Interview with J.K. Rowling
Librarian of Babel: The Gnostic Imagination of Jorge Luis Borges
We're So Sari: Indian Expat Novelists Evoke the Homeland
Science vs Art: David Lodge Roasts Some Old Academic Chestnuts in His New Novel 'Thinks...'
Brief Reviews of Recent Books
Short Story: 'Daniel Wentworth' by Rachel Carpenter
Short Story: 'I Was Just Looking' by Joe Kuhl
Hurrah for Auden and Other Weaklings
H.G. Wells Was a Womanizer But Was He Also a Plagiarist?
Chapter One of Amy Tan's 'The Bonesetter's Daughter'
Interview with Amy Tan
Talking to Ghosts: Amy Tan's Search for Roots
Amy Tan Gets Her Voice Back
From Havana With Love: Cuba's New Literary Voices
Dante: An Underworld Classic
Wyndham Lewis and the Pursuit of Anti-Pathos
Reading Vladimir Nabokov
John Updike on A. S. Byatt's Exploration of the Pleasures of Historical Fiction
Raymond Carver's Hardbitten Prose Style Has Had its Day
Lorna Sage
on Jeremy Treglown's 'Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green'
Deconstructive Criticism: Russell Jacoby on Marjorie Garber's 'Academic Instincts'
Thinking Big: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Gabriel García Márquez Writes about His Life of Magical Realism
Martin Amis on the Film of His Novel 'Dead Babies'
The Mysteries of the Moonlighting English Professor
Grisham Gets Serious
Oxford American Interview with John Grisham
'Unnatural Killers' by John Grisham
'The Birthday' by John Grisham
'The Faulkner Thing' by John Grisham
Witty Mischief-Maker Auberon Waugh is Dead at 61
Evelyn Waugh: The Height of His Powers
Evelyn Waugh: The Best and the Worst
Larry McMurtry on Why Books Survive
'A Christmas Carol': If Only Scrooge Could Tabulate His Box Office Receipts
'The Constant Gardener' by John le Carré: Part One
Back to the Future: The Dope on Utopian Fiction
Bringing Gusto to Criticism
How Aldous Huxley Managed to Avoid the Temptations of His Time
Plutarch & the Issue of Character
Sylvia Plath's Appetite for Good Food and Self-Destruction
Men Will Be Men, In Literature and in Life
The Life of an Extraordinary Gay Millonaire French Writer
Truman Capote: Novelist of Style and Clarity
Truman Capote Discusses the Nonfiction Novel
The Ghost of e-Books Past
Who Really Wrote 'The Night before Christmas'?
Text of 'The Night before Christmas'
The Art of Diary Keeping
Fitzgerald's 'Radiant World'
Paging Dr. Freud: A Psychoanalyst Offers Unusual Views of Shakespeare and Flaubert
Danielle Steel's Franchised Fiction
Back to Bloomsbury: Bio of Virginia Woolf That's Partly a Family Portrait and Memoir
Edward Said on Michel Foucault
The Bones in Mr. Eliot's Closet
Hunter S. Thompson's Letters Reveal a Voice Like No Other
Michiko Kakutani on 'Sir Vidia's Shadow'
Norman Mailer Talks with Michiko Kakutani
Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100 by Norman Mailer
The Gospel According to Norman Mailer
The Past and Its Power: Why I Wrote 'The Price' by Arthur Miller
Salem Revisited: Clinton and the Witchcraft Hysteria by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller on Tragedy and the Common Man
The 'Salesman' Has a Birthday by Arthur Miller
Journey to 'The Crucible' by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller on the Shooting of Robert Kennedy
Arthur Miller on the Moon Landing
Death in Tiananmen by Arthur Miller
Anxious Days for the Glass Family: John Updike on 'Franny and Zooey' by J.D. Salinger
John Updike on Finding Luxury in a Small Book
A Writer's Opinions on Vietnam by John Updike
Writers I Have Met by John Updike
John Updike on Golf
The Last Man of Letters: Paul Theroux on V. S. Pritchett
The Gifts of Peter De Vries by Paul Theroux
When the Peace Corps Was Young by Paul Theroux
V.S. Pritchett Himself by Paul Theroux
Speaking of Books: Creative Dissertating by Paul Theroux
An Author Chat With Paul Theroux: A Transcript
Theroux's Bitter Portrait of Naipaul Bonds Fact and Fiction
Paul Theroux Joins Critics on 'First Edition'
At the Edge of the Sea by Paul Theroux
Memory and Invention by Paul Theroux
Memories That Drive Hong Kong by Paul Theroux
What About Rushdie by Paul Theroux
An Edwardian on the Concorde: Graham Greene as I Knew Him by Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux Paints a Harsh Portrait of a Once-Beloved Mentor
Meeting V. S. Naipaul
Our Universal Civilization by V. S. Naipaul
Naipaul Reviews His Past from Afar
Rednecks, Millionaires and Catfish Farms -- A Review of 'A Turn in the South' by V. S. Naipaul
William Hazlitt, a Romantic Critic of Deep Feeling
Proust Regained: Appreciating the Full Weight of a Master's Sprawling Epic
A Dandy Style: Margaret Drabble on Spanish Novelist Javier Marías
James Joyce's 'Ulysses' in Chinese a Hot Seller
Richard Slotkin on Fiction for the Purposes of History
Arthur Miller Reflects on 'Salesman,' Politics, Theater and the Media
The Life and Work of Mary Shelley
The Puzzling Contradictions of Auberon Waugh
Japan's Nobel Prize Winning Novelist Kenzaburo Oe Talks about Tolerance, Politics and the Japanese Imagination
Brat Pack Novelist Jay McInerney's Glam Fixation
Why Did Theodore Sturgeon's Great Love Stories Languish in the Ghetto of Science Fiction?
Harold Bloom Has a Strange Way of Telling You 'How to Read and Why'
A Review of Harold Bloom's 'How to Read and Why'
Is Literature an Embattled Profession?
Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction
James A. Parr on Don Quixote: Translation and Interpretation
Howard Young on 'Game of Circles: Conversations Between Don Quixote and Sancho'
How Does A Poem Mean?
David Fromkin on the Importance of T. E. Lawrence
Jorge Luis Borges & the Plural 'I'
Is Andrew Motion's new biography of Philip Larkin a critical-bio version of 'Daddy, Dearest'?
Will Self Talks about Life, Death, Smack, and His Eighth Novel, 'How the Dead Live'
A 'witty and brilliantly imagined first novel', says Edward W. Said of Gloria Emerson's 'Loving Graham Greene'
Beryl Talks about Late Husband Robert Graves
'The Rose of Paracelsus', a Story by Jorge Luis Borges
Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' a Manufactured Masterpiece?
Margaret Invades J.D.’s Studio, J.D. Salinger on Trial
Review of a New Collection of Anton Chekhov's Stories
Ishiguro and Kneale on Whitbread shortlist
James Wood on Saul Bellow, 'the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century'
Edward W. Said on Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz
Review of 'Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life' by Bruce King
Derek Walcott: The Laureate of St. Lucia
Dreaming up the Doctor - A Review of 'Boswell's Presumptuous Task' by Adam Sisman
Has American Lit Crit Burned Out?
C.S. Lewis Remembered
How Much Should You Write A Day?
Clues to the Mysterious Life of P.D. James
A Brilliant Coleridge Bio
Review of Ralph Ellison's 'Juneteenth'
An English Life - The Serio-Comedy of Kingsley Amis
V.S. Naipaul - The Enigma of Denial
V.S. Naipaul on Reading & Writing (In His Own Words)
Review of V.S. Naipaul's 'Letters Between a Father and Son'
Father Knows Best - V.S. Naipaul and his 'Pa'
Bruce Chatwin - A Big-Headed Boy
A Craving for Reality - T.S. Eliot Today
Review of the 1839 Crime Classic 'Confessions of a Thug' by Philip Meadows
Review of 'Bellow: A Biography'
Review of Craig Raine's 'In Defence of T.S. Eliot'
The Original Wilde Child
An Ex-Flame Remembers Jack Kerouac
Salman Rushdie Finds Love & Literary Stimulus in New York
Five Days with Salman Rushdie
The Return of Hannibal Lecter
'The Art of Translation', Essay by Vladimir Nabokov
The Genius of P.G. Wodehouse
The Criterion Poetry Prize/Pop's Puerility/A Tribute to Penelope Fitzgerald
Robert Ruchman on the Poetry of Robert Graves
A Portrait of Henry Green, 'one of the literary enigmas of the twentieth century'
Analyzing A.N. Wilson's 'God's Funeral'
A Win for Susan Sontag, A Loss for Literary Culture
Susan Sontag: The Dark Lady of the Intellectuals
Are Wanda Tinasky's Letters the Work of Thomas Pynchon?
Is Bad Writing Necessary: George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature
'What is it about?' A Review of David Mitchell's Ambitious, Weighty First Novel 'Ghostwritten'
Sex and Single Girls: Review of Lucinda Rosenfeld 'What She Saw ..." and Candace Bushnell's 'Four Blondes'
Fiction That is Haunting and Brazenly Gay
Puritanism, Bigotry, Violence Figure Hugely in Philip Roth's 'The Human Stain'
Sena Jeter Naslund's Surprisingly Successful 'Ahab's Wife,' the Latest in the Emerging Genre of Footnote Fiction
Ron Hansen's 'Hitler's Niece' Imagines the Sex Life of Evil Personified
Geoff Dyer's 'Paris Trance' Follows Fitzgerald Back to France... on Ecstasy
There's Wit and Good Writing Aplenty in Nick Hornby's 'About a Boy'
Arthur Rimbaud and George Orwell - The Bad Gay Boy and the Cold War Saint
Annie Proulx Evokes the True Spirit of the West in Close Range: Wyoming Stories'
A Fugitive Past: Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro
1958 Atlantic Monthly Review of Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita'
1882 Atlantic Monthly Review of 'Leaves of Grass' by Walt Whitman
1861 Atlantic Monthly Review of 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens
1896 Atlantic Reassessment of Edgar Allan Poe
Phoebe Lou Adams's 1959 Review of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road'
Interview with Native American Writer Sherman Alexie
Interview with Dominican-born Novelist and Poet Julia Alvarez
Interview with African Writer Chinua Achebe
'Wild Apples', an Essay by Henry David Thoreau
The Story Behind Henry David Thoreau's 'Wild Apples'
A Novel of India's Coming of Age: 1981 Review of Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'