Today, few have heard of The Diary of a Lost Girl, the now-forgotten Margarete Böhme, or the controversy which once swirled around the book's authorship.

Like the groundbreaking book Gay New York by George Chauncey, Secret Historian reveals a vital subterranean culture, thriving throughout the early part of the 20th century.

Couldn't we, shouldn't we, be applying a bit of mouth-to-mouth to bring the great literary works, these beautiful creatures back to life for ourselves and for each other?

On the cover of one of the most widely read magazines in the country, a writer is looking directly back at us, and we are being told that His. Craft. Matters.

There can be only one rational response to the longueurs of a Manhattan August, when the city becomes a tropical marinade and everyone who can is eith...

As James Joyce once wrote, "Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not." Sweet, right? While we'd agree that ...

If you're the kind of person who's into transformational mid-life journeys told with self-deprecating charisma, the you're probably pretty psyched abo...

After I wrote my first blog post here, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction. I felt like I'd excavated something difficult about ethnicity and gender and literature and identity. Imagine my shock when I saw the ads by Google.

After a family dinner, while we were hitting the cookies, my father launched into the hair-raising story of how he, his sister, and his parents traveled from Alesund, Norway, to Newfoundland, Canada, in 1942.

One year ago today -- Bastille Day -- I released my debut novel The French Revolution on Twitter. It got some pretty good attention, and last fall I landed a traditional book deal with Soft Skull Press.

Under pressure to produce credible copy in far-flung corners of the globe for Forbes, I developed my reporting technique: I always headed first to the local food markets and had a meal.

They have been called India's biggest enemy, but Maoist rebels are also the unlikely subjects of a recent rash of movies and books that some say are r...

Graham Robb is making France irresistible again. His new book, Parisians, delivers nearly a score of long anecdotes about famous people in real scenes beyond imagining.

Rise above. Take flight. Move on. That is the message delivered so elegantly by Heidi Durrow. That's why this reader's recommendation is to pick it up. Check it out. And, most importantly, think and talk it through.

There are about 120,000 books published every year, and that's far too many for anyone to make an informed choice. You need some kind of recommendatio...

On my last trip to the library I took an unexpected turn and, facing a series of alarmingly engorged spines, realised I'd strayed into the "Literary N...

The Literati have been dividing literary culture for years, decrying popular fiction, dismissing authors, genres and authors exploring new media. And by doing so they have journeyed far, far away from the realm of relevancy.

Why couldn't one enterprising publisher, or rich guy, or Amazon, set up a literary talent development system modeled on the NFL draft to discover the next Junot Diaz?

Women travellers in fiction appear in many forms. First there are the more traditional travellers: the unconventional spinster, the ingénue flung int...

Amid all the hubbub provoked by The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list, one elephant-sized fact has been hidden in plain view. Fiction has become cultura...