So long as the Booker Prize keeps longlisting 13 titles, I'm going to keep making that joke. The Booker season is underway with the unveiling of 2008's longlist.

Film critics have lauded the French thriller Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) with adjectives fit for a personal ad: "taut," "sexy," "smart..." Having recently caught a matinee, I'm willing to attest to its tautness. However, the climax reminded...

It seems fitting to begin a reflection on the late David Foster Wallace in a fit of anxiety about reception - about the propensity of words, sentences, personae, to falsify or to be misunderstood. For example: I know this seems fraudulent an...

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. -William Butler Yeats, from “The Choice” I.  Art & Life If you’re like me, your...

The Daily Beast offers up a list of “the most overlooked reads of the past 10 years – none of which involve a wizard, a vampire, or a code” from John McGahern’s By the Lake to Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.

Amazon announced that on Christmas day it sold more Kindle ebooks than regular books (and that the Kindle is not the site’s most popular gift ever). Chadwick Matlin outlines at The Big Money the reasons why the Christmas day surge in ebook sales don’t...

Reading Virginia Woolf—whether you can, whether the reading is excruciating or transporting—is about finding your sea legs. Woolf’s prose sets you adrift in other minds, their unfamiliar eddies of fear, desire, and despair, their private...

This is the first book review I’ve written in nearly three years, since I hung up my reviewing socks following a stint at Publishers Weekly’s online division, where I was paid handsomely in American currency to review books about sports and music. ...