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Thomas Pynchon Against the Day. The Penguin Press, 1120 pages, $35 Thomas Pynchon's many fans love him the way teenagers love pop idols. For this kind of attention to be [...]

The Royal 10 typewriter was introduced in 1914 and was one of the last real advances in typewriter design. It had side panels of bevelled glass because the levers, gears, [...]

Glancing over the metaphorical shelves, one is forced to admit a certain trade deficit. Most interesting novels today seem to have been for sale in the U.K. first. Of course, [...]

One of the ways in which war becomes palatable to those not in the fight is by cliche. Even Sherman's impassioned plea that all glory in war is moonshine, that [...]

I have never felt that I have an obligation (professional or personal) to conceal the endings of books from people. I've always suspected that anyone who hasn't figured out where [...]

In the metaphysics of early computing, after the vacuum tubes, while the world was searching for the mouse, there came briefly to light an interesting cosmological problem. Graphical space can [...]

I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said 'I bring nothing to the table.' These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program [...]

I'd like to dispense straightaway with what I like about Martin Amis and move on to the meatier stuff. His secondary life's project--his primary one being himself--can be seen as [...]

It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. --Henry James, 'The Figure in the Carpet' The search for an enigma [...]

In 1996, Granta published the 'Best of Young American Novelists' issue, and this list has been famous ever since. The Twenty under Forty have had varying degrees of success, and [...]

Why can't you ever write a plain sentence like 'He finished his drink, left the pub and went home?' --Kingsley Amis to Martin Amis Some very good books have been [...]

Rick Moody Demonology. Little, Brown, 288 pages, $24.95 'Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find that he had been transformed into a cockroach' is no longer enough. What the [...]

Vassily Aksyonov The New Sweet Style. Random House, 482 pages, $29.95 In Vassily Aksyono's 1980 novel The Island of Crimea, an upset woman named Tanya walks into a diner and [...]

Dave Eggers You Shall Know Our Velocity. McSweeney's Books, 376 pages, $21 Dave Eggers, flamboyantly humble, ashamed of his success, wallowing in that same success, the biggest dork of all, [...]