"Then the excitement for me in really brilliantly done bricolage...is that the pieces come together as intellectual and emotional investigating. The shards have not only speed and magic, but they have momentum qua excavation."

A massive novel can be a difficult experience for people who don't find it ultra-compelling. Another drawback of a doorstop book is that the many days one spends on it could instead be used to read several shorter yet still excellent novels.

The fact of Proust's poems will be news to many, the number and quality of them yet another surprise. Astonishing to virtually all of us, though, comes the revelation that Proust spent much of his life trying to decide whether he was a poet or a prose writer.

Proust considered that describing what one sees in nature is the ultimate sign of a great artist. His asthma attacks did not allow him the joy of the outdoors. Janet Malcolm's Burdock, and its scrutiny of the 28 photographs of uncelebrated leaves, would have been a huge comfort to him.

I realize that continuing to slog through a novel that says "stop reading me" after 100 pages may pay dividends when I reach the end of the book. Dense can turn into sophisticated, confusing into illuminating.

They were unplanned "Five-Year Plans" for the ages: the amazing proliferation of classic novels published from 1846 to 1851 and from 1922 to 1927. And, believe it or not, one author had a book in both those periods!

To match our romantic bookstore marriage proposal story from last week, reader Stephanie Campisi sent us the story of library marriage proposal....

Here are ten other beds that don't include a good night's sleep.

Since 1901, the Nobel Committee has honored outstanding individuals in the fields of science, peace and literature with a medal, personal diploma, cas...

Their writings help us see in different and remarkable ways the extent to which literature and telephones are in cahoots. When the phone starts ringin...

Salinger gave my generation a permission to write about our lives, our very ordinary adolescent times. He gave us our voice, our right to be serious in our own postwar, perhaps over-privileged, tones.

In The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives, Brian Dillon goes into gory detail in describing the afflictions -- or presumed afflictions -- gripping the nonet.