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January. When the assisted dying bill comes in, I'll be first in the queue. Nonstop nosebleeds, Covid-esque symptoms, leg cramps, a cough resistant to antibiotics, and unremunerated press interviews for […]

Shawn Levy is busy. His Ryan Reynolds starrer Free Guy just debuted at No. 1; Netflix, where he and his 21 Laps have 15 projects in active development, announced this [...]

Malcolm Lowry was drunk and alone in a hotel room on Vancouver's skid row. For six years, the transplanted English man had been riding the explosive success of his novel […]

After having his novel accepted by a publisher, a young writer takes to the road in his Landcruiser, lighting out for the border via the Nullarbor route across the Bight. Upon completing the novel the author had a nagging feeling that the book was not finished and that he would miss his deadline. Regretfully the writer began the project from the beginning and finished the novel in 55 days.

"If Stephen King, John Grisham, and Michael Crichton got together, they'd become one of the top three publishers overnight." -- Morgan Entrekin, publisher for Grove Press, quoted in The New […]

"A romance writer's two-year flight from justice ended in a style befitting one of her novels this week, when law enforcement agents knocked on her door at a low-budget motel […]

"He writes like I used to.... I should have him assassinated before it's too late." -- Larry Niven, blurbing Stephen Baxter's Raft. "Do I sound a little envious? Well, let's […]

The atmosphere at universities and in scientific research discourages what could be useful communication between members of different areas of study. Writers are also not inclined enough to pool their talents and knowledge.

Few people want old computers and they are almost impossible to sell even if they are useful. Older computers are not compatible with current machines, and old printers make too much noise, ugly copies and are too slow. However, aspiring writers will take donated computers of any kind.

Thoreau's accounts of his travels through Maine were dishonest. He claims to have encountered kind and friendly people during his adventures. Along the same trek, a journalist encounters malicious, unfriendly people and daunting natural obstacles.

My English friend Aaron Judah, raised in a mercantile family in Bombay, didn't mind me occasionally teasing him with the name 'Jude the Obscure,' because we were all pretty obscure. [...]

Novelist and screenwriter Pete Dexter often brings the bitterness and violence of his life into his writing. His latest novel is 'Brotherly Love.'

Book tours can be very nervous experiences aside from very tiresome ones and attempts to release some of the tension can backfire. There are, however, ways to reduce the tension and the entire tour can be a very rewarding learning experience.

From 'Rhyming Action,' by Charles Baxter, in the Fall 1996 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. Baxter is the author of a book of Poetry, six books of fiction, and [...]

Byline: AS TOLD TO LIZ BRODY PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW HETHERINGTON 'I Could Have Been a Mob Wife' It's all parties and drama on the reality hit Mob Wives , but [...]

Some things she presumably wants to teach Cain: * There was no Serbian genocide in the 1990s. * There is creeping Sharia in the United States. * 'The conventional wisdom [...]

Byline: Jeffrey Goldberg It is fairly uncommon for a blogger to become a head of state (I think it has only happened three or four dozen times). But now my [...]

Byline: Patrick F. McManus In our return from a recent fishing trip, Retch Sweeney suddenly asked, "You want to swing by the Eighty?" "Gosh, yes," I said. "I haven't seen […]

We have had the Walkies; now there's the MacCrawlies. Those superb athletes Malcolm Gibson (James Thin), Willie Anderson (John Smith & Son) and Bob Cripps (DSA) plan to cross Scotland [...]

That Judith Regan sounds like a feisty dame. The HarperCollins us publisher stars in a New York Post story (thank you, Publishers Lunch, the online news service, headlined 'Throw the [...]

Big Kiss by Henry Alford As a bracing antidote to the bios of the stars, I cracked open Alford's hilarious saga about trying to break into showbiz. Alford already had [...]

I've fallen in love with the controller of Radio Four. It's a bloody nuisance, frankly. Since starting this column, I've tried to avoid consorting with BBC executives in case I [...]

Another week, another new novel. Which character am I this time? Another week, another book launch. This week, it was Jill Westwood's first novel, Holding the Centre. I can't say [...]

In a recent column in the online magazine Salon, Anne Lamott made the following proposal: 'Rather than make perfectly good writers crank out new books every few years because they [...]

I guess you all are wondering what I think about that auction of Salinger's letters. All I know is that this guy Peter Norton (he's an investor in The Nation, [...]

In Competition No. 2740 you were invited to submit the ten work Commandments of the writer of your choice, living or dead. There were some cracking entries this week--far more [...]

In Competition No. 2630 you were invited to imagine that a literary giant of the pre-television age is guest TV critic on The Spectator , and submit an extract from [...]