Criticism

Retro-noir fiction makes a comeback, courtesy of the Hard Case Crime imprint.

Neale Donald Walsch victimized by his own brain, Joshua Casteel on his opposition to the war, Macmillen facetiously explains how books are published, and video of Whitman reading his work.

How will John Updike’s writing measure up twenty years from now?

The talk-show host recurses into himself, courtesy of Lawrence Lessig.

Mark Doty, Billy Collins, and Robert Pinsky get excited about a Thomas Hardy poem, plus CAPTCHA poetry, classifying profanity, and more.

I’d put up $20 that one of these six books will make the NYT Best Books of 2009.

In early October 2007, almost three years to the day after I began my career as a journalist in Russia, a conversation with a former CIA agent brought it to an end. 

In 1827, Thomas de Quincey suggested that murder was becoming a new medium for the artist: “People begin to see,” he wrote, “that something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife...

Kimberly Johnson, Alex Lemon, and Brenda Shaughnessy take up the poetics of God-lust with renewed, edgy, often darkly humorous imagination in distinctive second books of poetry.

The best poetry of the year counted down.