Novels

Literature fans love "encounters" with living or dead authors. These might involve seeing novelists at book signings, listening to them give a talk, or visiting homes/museums connected with famous authors of the past.

A day at Texas Stadium is more than enough time for 19-year-old, Silver Star-winning Billy Lynn to see all that's wonderful and troubling about America.

Olive Kitteridge is enthralling and appalling, and it might cause novel readers to find themselves falling... in love again with short stories.

It's not like writers are ballerinas who can't do splits without injuring ourselves after a certain age, or even football players too fat to run. Is it?

Searching for home -- for a safe place to rest your head, grow a family, and be part of a community -- occupies the heart of Morrison's body of work. How fitting then that her latest book has such a simple title: Home.

For a book with "Solitude" in its title, it sure has lots of characters! After recently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I've been thinking about whether novels are better with large casts or small casts.

For me, writing novels is an arachnid process: novels are spun into intricate webs out of the silk in my gut. It's work. It's hard. But, to mix metaphors, it's not all pushing a rock uphill.

If you're trying to think of a Mother's Day present for mom, how about a novel featuring a memorable mother? The book could star a saintly mom, a hellish mom, or a more realistic mom between those two extremes.

I love Twitter -- especially for the friendships it has brought me.

The 1800s were of course a time of blatant racism, and many authors reflected that by depicting fictional characters of color in horribly stereotyped ways. Or they omitted those characters entirely, as if the world was populated by whites only.

When this book was released, as a great fan of Dr. Sanjay Gupta, I immediately marched down to my local Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of his novel. Yes, a novel -- not a medical guidebook.

Over time, my writing has become less and less about me. What I have discovered is that the further I move from myself, the richer my writing has become.

Women writers have used initials and male pen names for centuries to cover up their gender, knowing that for some readers (namely male), simply seeing a female's name on the cover of a book would dissuade them.

There aren't enough hours in a day -- or in a weekday, at least. So how do you cram in the pleasure of reading great (and not-so-great) novels? This is one person's tale of how I managed to carve out time for literature.

Does durability, for example, constitute an important definition of what is or becomes a literary novel? How does a novel become a classic? Who determines what becomes a classic?

Of course, not reading more of an author is a no-brainer when you thoroughly dislike the first novel you try by him or her. But things get trickier when you have some positive feelings about a book, as I did with The Magnificent Ambersons.

Now, maybe some writers can write to a formula, can churn out books that try to catch the cultural mood, books that mimic best sellers, but I suspect most authors are like me: We write the books we want to.

Creating a novel is tough. Until you get the hang of it, it can be hard to do the Proustian thing.

Whimsical and melancholy, believable and not, The Snow Child is an honest exploration of the weight of grief and the saving grace of love.

UPDATE: We have a winner! Feel free to keep telling us your favorite books that aren't on our list below, but the votes have been tallied, and the fin...