John Updike would have been 79 this Sunday. When he died of lung cancer in January 2009 the Web lit up with tributes, and as I read them I remembered my own John Updike story.

"A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter" by William Deresiewicz Los Angeles Ti...

Madison Smartt Bell’s latest novel "The Color of Night" landed on my desk with a handwritten note from his publicist: “Check out the acknowledgmen...

"The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace Slate Incomplete or not, The Pale King is whole enough, a fully imagined, often exquisitely fleshed-out ...

Contemptible as Pat Robertson's Haiti statement is -- in the eyes of God and of all humanity -- I'd just as soon dispose of it by ignoring it... let it fade out as the static it is. Except that it's not just static.

'A Hidden Haitian World', Madison Smartt Bell The New York Review of Books Massacre River, by René Philoctète, translated from the French by Linda ...

An unusual person came to a reading I gave not long ago in Jackson, Mississippi. He seemed like he might be just a little crazy, but then lots of the people I know do.

David Brion Davis The New York Review of Books Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, by Madison Smartt Bell (Pantheon) The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1...

Miss some of the weekend's book reviews? We're back again to catch you up with a book review round-up of the newest in fine literature and in... well,...