The Big Sleep

Writing a novel is a supreme effort of imagination, creativity, and discipline. Building a world with words and inhabiting it with characters readers care about is an amazing achievement. The mental effort is so exacting, in fact, that some of the best writers in history have produced novels that feature at least one tremendous flaw. […]

Whatever kind of reading you like best in life, you can find your match in a good noir detective novel. Great stories with complex plots? Noir. Hilarious humor, albeit of a generally dark variety? Noir. Unforgettable characters? Noir. Breathless action? Noir again. If you’ve fallen behind the curve on noir fiction, now’s the time to […]

The novel has been the dominant form of literature for centuries, evolving and changing in exciting, unexpected ways over the years. Just when you think we know what a novel can do, a book comes along that does something no one ever thought of before. Every now and then that innovation is so powerful, it […]

Naming a sports team after literature—that’s pretty awesome. (The Baltimore Ravens of the NFL are technically; they’re named after an intimidating bird, but the team is specifically named after “The Raven,” the classic, super-spooky poem by Baltimore resident Edgar Allen Poe.) With baseball season coming up, we took it upon ourselves to give every Major […]