It may come as something of a surprise that Vendela Vida doesn't have access to the internet at her home, but make no mistake, she's very connected.

Whatever subjects we choose, as women writers we are cataloging historical and cultural events in ways that go far deeper than the two-dimensional stories told by photographs. We get into the heads of our audience in ways that movies still can't.

These days, I'm having a lot of trouble with irony. Sometimes I'm even afraid of the concept. Imagine that -- a literature professor afraid of irony. Isn't that ironic? Why am I afraid?

Happy birthday, Joan Didion! The writer who made a name for herself with her first novel, Run, River, and her first book of literary journalism, Slouc...

Lists are arbitrary. No formula can rank James Joyce over Vladimir Nabokov, or Edith Wharton over Jane Austen. The intellectual knows it's most important to try and read all those great novels.

This slender memoir -- not in richness but size -- is about food, love, loss, the Harvard-heavy social structure of Cambridge; about growing up alone in a crowded room; and about the lessons that pass from mother to daughter.

Beyond the raw details of her daughter's death, beyond her grasp to understand its aftermath and its applied metaphor, Blue Nights deals with the physical "dismantling" of Didion herself.

I once slept with a man because he gave me a copy of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Before you judge me, read the book. It's lyrical and seductive and changes the way you think about reality, about life.

The publishing industry has now fully readied itself for the holidays, with offerings that include yet more aggressively-promoted slices of first-person recollection.

Blue Nights is the story of Joan Didion's craving for communion between the "I" of her individual event of loss and grief, and the "we" of its universal experience.

In discoursing on her daughter's death -- and after having analyzed in print her reaction to a husband's demise -- Joan Didion is absolutely dealing with reality, but is she dealing with everyone's reality?

Tragedy in Joan Didion’s life became a common theme of her writing. "The Year of Magical Thinking," her memoir about the death of her husband John D...

The Bronte sisters weren't alone in blood being as thick as ink.