We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our life stories and – equally important….

A hilarious academic novel that'll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom. . . . [A] mordant minor masterpiece. ….

Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or ene….

According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible..

Flawless . . . Tightly choreographed . . . Shipstead gains entry into exclusive worlds and trains her opera glasses on private social rituals, as wel….

It’s Fitzgerald’s thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us….

To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoor….

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to g….

All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories..

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fair….

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself..

I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart ….

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when ….

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her “real” life..