authors

In my 15 years working at the Library of Congress – my previous stop before AARP – one particular date stands out: Sept. 8, 2001. That was the day of the inaugural Library of Congress National Book Festival.

Is it fair to separate "commercial" novels from "literary" ones? If anyone can answer that question it's 10-book author Meredith Maran, whose new anthology Why We Write features essays by everyone from Sue Grafton and David Baldacci to Ann Patchett and Walter Mosley. "I chose the authors to include…

Is the book experience displacing the book review? Someone wondered that recently on Twitter, and it got me thinking about the differences between reading an author on the page and hearing his or her words in person.

Back in the 1980s,  I moved to California to work at the Orange County Register , where, at the time, the real estate beat was covered by a woman named Jane Glenn Haas. I never knew her very well, but she seemed like one of those old-fashioned  newspaper reporters, the ones who'd been cultivating…

Zig Ziglar was to success what Chuck Taylor was to basketball sneakers and what Chubby Checker was to The Twist.

Jacques Barzun was one of the great thinkers of the past century - a scholar who, in a remarkable eight-decades-long career, wrote dozens of books and analyzed subjects ranging from classical music to detective fiction, and from Jonathan Swift to baseball.