Eowyn Ivey's debut novel, The Snow Child, is the stuff of folktale: a childless and struggling couple in 1920s Alaska build a little snowman, only to later find in its place a one-way trail of departing footprints and a blond-haired girl disappearing through the woods in the snow creation's mittens...

Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature, was born on January 24, 1862, 150 years ago today.

Born Edith Newbold Jones into a wealthy American family -- her family is said to have been the...

Uh-oh. The year's "great books" lists have begun. Female authors have put on our literary heels and danced backward as well as we can, but it looks like we're going to be left tapping our toes to the music while...

"Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up." - Margaret Atwood

"Here men's feet rested at night next to the eagles' feet... and at dawn they stepped with the thunder's feet onto the thinning mists" - Pablo Neruda, "Alturos de Macchu Picchu"

One hundred years ago, an ancient ruin called the lost city of the Incas was rediscovered. A...

A feminist Jew, a wise Latina woman, and a Harvard Law dean walk into a bar... Thirty years ago, that would have been the opening of what would now be seen as a politically incorrect joke, the bar a place to drink rather than an entry into the practice of...

I spent an inspiring and entirely too short weekend gathering with readers and other writers at Printer's...

"I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth."

Those words, spoken fifty years ago today -- John F. Kennedy addressing a joint session of Congress -- came just weeks...

Fifty years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, twenty-three days after Russian Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth. In fifteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds, the Mercury capsule rose 116.5 miles -- jettisoning its rockets on the way up -- before turning nose and heat...

"I never minded reading to three people. I had plenty of experience. The key is that all of you must sit very close together." - Ann Patchett, from "My Life in Sales" in the Atlantic

I'm on book tour with The Four Ms. Bradwells. That's the good news...

Fifty years ago -- on April 12, 1961 -- Yuri Gagarin set off from a launch pad at the Cosmodrome at Baikonur, near Lake Aral in what was then the U.S.S.R. He landed one hour and forty-eight minutes later in a farm field 400 miles southeast of Moscow. His countrymen...

Pencil, from the Latin penicillus, meaning "little tail." Little tail?

Not everyone writes even occasionally with the old-fashioned yellow pencil with pink eraser top anymore. This astonishing fact came to my attention through a more newfangled way to communicate, the Facebook post. But the lowly pencil remains my writerly tool...

Thirty years ago today, on March 6, 1981, Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time. He hosted the CBS Evening News for 19 years, shaping a generation. He was there for the first nationally televised political convention coverage covering Republicans and Democrats alike. He brought the Vietnam War, the...