Books

February 4: Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army on this day in 1974, so beginning one of the strangest tales of the American counterculture. Though Hearst herself has faded from view, glimpsed only in the odd movie or newspaper...

The author of Charles Dickens: A Life on what happens "when you live with Dickens for years."

Tales of love between plain Janes and their beautiful beaus.

An odd couple falls in, then out of, love.

[Drumroll, please...] The 2o11 Discover Great New Writers Award shortlist, chosen by our esteemed judges, and presented in alphabetical order by title.

Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep returns to solve another head-spinning, stomach-turning case in John Burdett's fifth Bangkok-based novel. In this instance, a particularly gruesome triple murder launches the idiosyncratic, personal-prob...

February 3: The Chinese novelist and playwright Lao She was born on this day in 1899. Lao She is regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century Chinese writers and was one of the first to gain popular fame in America, where his novel Rickshaw ...

February 2: Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon on this day in 1870. When the two began courting, Livy was a twenty-three-year-old semi-invalid with waning hope of finding full health or a suitable husband. Twain was ten years older and a rising star, kn...

A guide to the art and artifice of writing blurbs for books.   1.  Use "I should have known" at the start of any quote you decide to give.  As in "I should have known Meghan Askew would write the best vampire-leprechaun novel of the de...

The pathos exhibited in Gin Phillips acclaimed debut novel, 2008's The Well and the Mine, is again on display in this sensitive story of a 36-year-old archeologist, Ren, whose life was altered by the death of her brother. Even long after his passing, R...

Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, detailed the rock star and poet's extraordinary relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The Coral Sea, Smith's 1996 ode to her late friend, was written just a few years after his ...

Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, detailed the rock star and poet's extraordinary relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The Coral Sea, Smith's 1996 ode to her late friend, was written just a few years after his ...