In Alexander and Alestria, Shan Sa (Empress, 2003) weaves her own mythology in order to create the back story for Alestria, a woman warrior who in battle meets and falls ... Read More

In The Butt, Will Self's main character, Tom Brodzinski, is vacationing in a tropical, sunbaked land with his family when he sets off an absurd and horrible chain of events ... Read More

When I was a kid in the mid-1970s, a gray-haired, white-suited comedian burst seemingly out of nowhere, straight to the top. He was on Saturday Night Live every week, and ... Read More

TIME's Planet Earth: An Illustrated History arrived on my doorstep last week and has spent the past few days open on our kitchen table. It's a mesmerizing collection of nature ... Read More

Philip Roth's Indignation is narrated by a young Jewish man from New Jersey and follows him to college in Winesburg, Ohio as he attempts to improve his social status and ... Read More

In an effort to glean a list of books capable of sparking broad conversations from the thousands published each year, the World Book Day team asked publishers large and small ... Read More

271 titles were submitted in the Fiction category and the 5 National Book Awards Finalists in Fiction, announced today, are: Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba Peter Matthiessen, ... Read More

Indian author, Aravind Adiga, won the £50,000 Man Booker prize today for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Michael Portillo, the chair of the Booker judges characterized the final panel ... Read More

The Oxford English Dictionary turns 80 and is celebrating with special events at Oxford. Maud Newton is in London for the festivities which include a panel discussion tomorrow with ... Read More

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a French novelist, became the 14th French writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The Academy called Le Clézio “an author of new departures, poetic ... Read More

Bernard Loiseau was one of only twenty-five French chefs to hold Europe's highest culinary award, three stars in the Michelin Red Guide, and only the second chef to be personally ... Read More

This year's Nobel Prize in literature will be announced tomorrow, and bets are on as to who the winner will be. Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, ... Read More

Neal Stephenson was in town last week reading from Anathem. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down and talk with him a bit about philosophy, clocks, ... Read More

Jeffrey Kluger, a senior writer for Time magazine, introduces us to the new scientific discipline of Simplexity - the notion that seemingly complex things can be more simple than they ... Read More

Nebula and Hugo award-winning fantasy fiction author Kelly Link has a new YA collection of short stories out entitled Pretty Monsters. You can learn more about it on her ... Read More

Alafair Burke continues to expand the power and scope of her writing. In Angel's Tip, her fifth novel, she has soundly placed herself into the top level of those who ... Read More