As an undergraduate I became fixated on my tutor, Ann Wordsworth, a woman of devastating command who held the other English Literature dons in contempt. Tutorials were conducted in a grubby shed in the college grounds where we chain-smoked Gitanes and quaffed red wine...

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at," wrote Oscar Wilde in 1891. Yet for nearly two thousand years after Plato's Republic, most Western thinkers did ignore Wilde's map. Christianity, as interpreted by the Apostle Paul,...

Biography is autobiography, as every biographer knows. If a biographer cannot find himself in his subject, then the result is a compendium of names and dates, people met and places visited—useful information, perhaps, but the subject is just as dead at the end of...

I’d been researching a biography of the late art dealer Richard Bellamy (1927–1998) for several years when he popped up in a dream. In waking hours, I tracked the man whom everybody called Dick through the postwar art world, perplexed by his absence from...

“Why did you write this book the way you did?” the interviewer asks. The query is delivered in the kindly, hushed tone that one might use with a schoolboy who has a “kick me” sign taped to his back.

When you write a novel, people want to know if the events are true. Did this really happen? No, I say. That’s what makes it a novel. But some of the things in Hurt People did happen to me. That too is...

A few weeks ago, when I was in London to present my book about Moscow, I was asked—like many a debut author—how much of the story was based on my own experience. This was just after my first public reading—I was still shaken—and...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

Like Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Christopher Logue’s “account” of the Iliad is an imagist epic. It is surely less various and original than its modernist precursors, but it can’t be matched for sheer pleasure. With plot and character given, Logue attends to local intensities and...

Who could resist this invitation to eavesdrop on the fabulous? The title for Ange Mlinko’s most recent book, Marvelous Things Overheard, is taken from a collection of anecdotes and wonders, falsely attributed to Aristotle, which explain, in tight descriptive units, marvels of the...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City (FSG Originals) is a nonfiction look at more than two thousand years of heists, break-ins, and escapes. His book approaches the city the way a burglar would, with an eye for vulnerabilities and blind...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

There are many ways to write about Africa, but talent remains the compass. While the continent’s history cannot be easily summarized, its predicament is still one of domination, a taxing predicament that calls for sagacity as well as imagination. Writing under domination is not...

I think of poetry as what Wallace Stevens called a soliloquy of the interior paramour, or less grandly, as a form of talking to yourself, rather than addressing an audience. But I have the sense that when people first hear this description of poetry,...

Every fake should tell a story. Maybe it’s the blue chalk marks on the back of the frame, partially removed by hand, that suggest previous auction sales. Or maybe it’s the insect frass on the picture itself, evoking decades of neglect in an attic,...

The village of Saltleigh, the setting of my new novel The Crooked House, is a place that has inhabited the shadows of my imagination for a very long time—in much the same way as it has haunted the dreams of my protagonist, Esme...

Karen Olsson on where fiction touches the real, where our empathy most easily attaches, and how the true-life scandal of the Iran-Contra affair revealed itself to be the perfect backdrop for her sophomore novel, All the Houses, which NPR has called "funny,...