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The Top 10 Henry James Novels
Michael Gorra, author of the new critical biography, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, gives us his favorites of the prolific writer's novels and longer stories.
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5 Things You Didn't Know About Sleep
PW Pick Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep has everything you ever wanted to know about sleep, including myths and truths, as well as the downright strange. Author David K. Randall shares five facts from his book.
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Books I Love: Paula Bomer
Books I Love is a series where writers talk about the books that inspired them, the books they keep coming back to, and the books they'll always remember. Paula Bomer, author of the new novel Nine Months, picks her favorites.
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PW Picks: The Best New Books for the Week of August 20, 2012
This week, the new Martin Amis novel, a small town murder mystery, and Nick Hornby's reading list. Plus, a literary horror novel set in a mental hospital where the patients believe the devil is hiding.
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The Troubled History Behind George Orwell's Complete Works
Peter Davison, the editor of The Complete Works of George Orwell, discusses its troubled genesis and what might loosely be called "the autobiography Orwell never wrote"--his Diaries and A Life in Letters--now to be published for the first time in the United States.
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How I Turned My Life Into a Memoir
David Fitzpatrick's Sharp is a memoir covering his 46-year-life, and his two-decade struggle with bipolar disorder and self-injury. Here, he writes about how he turned his experiences into a memoir.
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How To Write a Novel About Your Family
Vincent Lam's debut novel The Headmaster's Wager (Hogarth) is suspense, humor, and tenderness set against the backdrop of 1960s Saigon. The story was inspired by the story of his grandparents and here, Lam explains the process of writing it as a novel.
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PW Picks: Best New Books for Week of August 13, 2012
This week, a heartfelt caper from an Arrested Development writer and a book on everything you ever wanted to know about sleep.
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5 Writing Tips from Chelsea Cain
Bestselling author Chelsea Cain's Kill You Twice (just released from Minotaur) is the fifth thriller featuring Det. Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell, and it's every bit as engrossing as the previous books in the series. Cain gave PW her five tips for writing.
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The Top 10 Most Difficult Books
The editors of the Millions' "Difficult Books" series pick the 10 most difficult books ever. Read all 10 and you'll probably ascend to the being immediately above Homo sapiens.
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How Dante's 'Inferno' Became Modern
Mary Jo Bang's translation of Dante's Inferno replaces his original references with more current ones like Bob Dylan, the paintings of Rodin, and Star Trek. The result is Dante for the next generation. Here, she tells us her method for modernizing the epic.
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PW Picks: The Best New Books for the Week of August 6, 2012
This week, Bob Dylan in Dante's Inferno and a post-apocalyptic literary novel that reads like Billy Collins adapting a George Romero zombie flick.
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How Do Black Holes Work?
Caleb Scharf's Gravity's Engines is a vivid and accessible exploration of black holes, those terrible things we fear but don't really understand. Here, Scharf gives us a primer on what exactly a black hole is.
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The Wolf: Literature's Symbol of Evil
L. Annette Binder’s Rise is a collection of fairy tales set in Colorado, except that the witch, lucky Hans, and the frog prince are all characters at the fringes of everyday life. The wolf appears from time to time in her stories.
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The Women Behind the Greatest Works of Russian Literature
The new book, The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants, is about six women: from Vera Nabokov to Sophia Tolstoy to Natalya Solzhenitsyn. Here, author Alexandra Popoff explores the intimate relationships between the women and their husbands, and how they changed the landscape of literature forever.
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PW Picks: The Best New Books for the Week of July 30, 2012
This week: a talking pig, a political disaster, and a gripping WWII spy story. Plus: Bruce Wagner's latest.
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7 Smart Romance Books
According to Romance Writers of America, purchases of romance novels outstrip every other fiction genre. Still, romance doesn't get much respect. Anne Browning Walker, author of The Booby Trap, is out to change that.
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How Do You Write a Book Narrated by a Pig? PW Talks with Russell Potter
Pyg: The Memoirs of Toby, the Learned Pig is Russell Potter's wildly imaginative new novel told from the perspective of a pig in eighteenth-century England that begins in a sideshow and ends up in Oxford and Edinburgh, where Toby studies.
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8 Areas of Culture 'Moby-Dick' Influenced
From Led Zeppelin to the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Moby-Dick has influenced the world for the last 150 years. George Cotkin, author of Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick, explores all the links to the white whale.
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3 Events that Shaped Postwar America
Joshua B. Freeman's American Empire: 1945-2000: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home covers the highs and lows of America's glory years, which, even when things were at their best, were never completely fulfilled. Freeman distilled his epic survey into three critical events that shaped America's last half-century.
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