Taken from The Things That Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything ($14.95, Atlantic Books, distributed in the U.S. by Trafal...

Among literature's most popular plot devices are the obstructions authors put on the road of love. It's hard not to get engrossed when two characters are thwarted from finding happiness with each other.

With Aug. 15 being the 100th anniversary of Julia Child's birth, I figured a post about food in novels might be appropriate.

Authors often write what they know, so it's no surprise that many fictional characters are authors themselves.

Literature fans love "encounters" with living or dead authors. These might involve seeing novelists at book signings, listening to them give a talk, or visiting homes/museums connected with famous authors of the past.

Creating a novel is tough. Until you get the hang of it, it can be hard to do the Proustian thing.

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is an epic tragedy that leaves readers shocked and awed. But, along the way, there are some delightfully funny interludes -- most notably the pre-voyage scene in which Ishmael and Queequeg end up in the same bedroom.

My list includes the authors' names, the number of novels I've read by each of them, and my three favorite novels (in rank order) by each of them. If you have different favorites by those authors, I'd like to hear about that.

I used to put books aside especially for the summer, knowing I'd have more time and feel more relaxed, less stressed, more open to the long loving voyage with an accomplished author at the helm.

There are plenty of cases where an author's masterpiece deserves the top billing it gets in the author's canon. But then there are the cases where a writer's most famous book is not the writer's best book.

It's Black Friday and time to go on a literary shopping spree, not the way James Franco went on a spree buying up film rights to books, but learning f...

For some reason I am aching for Paris. Perhaps because my novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, is launched tomorrow, and a good portion of the book takes ...