You can’t read music. Okay, maybe you can read music, in the sense that you can look at sheet music or a score and your use your brain to translate that...

Most of the time, reading a novel is pretty straightforward. Step one: pick up book. Step two: open book. Step three: read, and enjoy. Some novels,...

A quick glance at the list of Oscar® nominees confirms that 2014 was a great year at the movies. It was also a very good year for moviegoing readers: of...

Life’s not getting any easier—and neither are these books. While there’s nothing wrong with reading a brisk spy novel or a weepy romance or a horror...

The novels of Thomas Pynchon have generally been considered unfilmable. Dense, chaotic, cerebral—Pynchon’s oeuvre is composed of novels that don’t...

If you’ve been conscious at any time in the last century or so, you’re familiar with private detective tropes: the hardboiled operator who’s as quick...

Epigraphs are pretty versatile little literary devices. They can be the uncensored mouthpiece of an author. They are, at times, like an outside...

Debut novels are often intimate in theme, small in scope, and under-read. When big, sprawling books seem to drop from nowhere, they usually boast, on a...