On my first day at Tin House (and during cocktail hour), I anxiously asked Williams what she was reading/what I should be reading. Don DeLillo's Point Omega, she told me.

What does it mean to have a voice, one that from the first line grabs you and remains with you long after the last one? A strong, unique voice aligned with all the elements of life? Such is the question I have been mulling over of late.

A lot of my bookworm qualities and habits stem from a childhood surrounded by and bolstered by the stacks of books my mother read. While the whole family was distinctly bookish -- we really have more books than is healthy -- my mom was book hoarder in charge.

When that eureka moment hits you though, what happens next? That huge PDF file on your computer isn't going to leap out and sell itself. You have to know how to put it out to your audience and go through the steps you need to take to get it ready for consumption.

This question originally appeared on Quora. Answer by Cristina Hartmann, Writer Jay Gatsby is so great, so compelling because he's one of th...

When a key character in a novel is passive and/or modest, that spells trouble for the book -- right? Not necessarily. A seemingly boring protagonist ...

Maybe it certifies me as an old fogey even at 33, but I actually enjoy the Dewey Decimal System, and the associated process of flipping through books with your hands to see if the title you seek is or is not in the right place. There is something therapeutic and educational about that.

As someone whose heroes are almost exclusively literary, it is hard to describe the emotions I felt discovering the love affair that occurred in the summer and fall of 1851 between Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville.

Anybody who's kept up with my blog (sup, Mom) knows that I've been reading a little bit of David Shields lately. What you don't know is how totally his books have bowled me over.

In contemporary Maine, a teenage boy's racially-charged prank prompts his New York attorney uncles to converge on the town of their youth in Elizabeth Strout's latest, The Burgess Boys, but it's the sister who never left who understands alienation best.

In honor of women's history month and to celebrate the paperback publication of The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R., I arranged an interview with Eugénie R. herself (heretofore known only as my fictional character) to find out how this 19th century woman feels about our 21st century world.

The books that change our lives. It sounds like the dramatic segue into the credits of a soap opera, but it's kind of true right? There are those books that change the way you see the world, a person or yourself that stay with you forever.

The current dispute between the book retailer Barnes & Noble and the publisher Simon & Schuster has caused much handwringing and worry. But the dispute is one that has visited all changing industries fighting a rear-guard action against newer, more visionary competition.

The Deliverance of Others offers political and aesthetic reflections on the global age and interrogates received conceptions of rationality, the family, the body, and human capacities for emotional connection.

Here's an excerpt from Episode 157, my conversation with Ayana Mathis, author of the bestselling novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. It was hand-selected by Oprah Winfrey as an official pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0.