The dust jacket of Lorrie Moore’s new book “A Gate at the Stairs” informs us that she writes about “the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.”

This book was inevitable. When 12 debatably offensive cartoons depicting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad were published in the Danish newspaper “Jyllands-Posten” in September 2005, the ensuing international controversy, moral crusade, civic violence and political strife demanded more than press coverage; this story begged, and will continue begging, for an explanation.

Anyone who has heard of Tao Lin, the 26-year-old Brooklyn writer, is probably aware of his proclivity for publicity stunts.

Here’s a test for you: go to the bookstore (the big one, not Labyrinth) and see how many “How to … Write!” books you can find. Then go and check out — hey, what’s that? More writing books!

Thomas Pynchon doesn’t usually write this quickly. His books, which tend to be extended affairs — “Against the Day” (2006) sprawled over 1,085 pages — usually come one per decade, and they’re not exactly beach-read material. “Inherent Vice,” however, follows its predecessor into print a mere three years later, and it bears testament to a less belabored writing process: with fewer than 400 pages of mostly lucid narrative, it may be the most accessible book Pynchon has ever written.

Barack Obama is our president and Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 is his secretary of state. That’s how things are now. But think back to just over a year ago, to the presidential primaries.

One shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — or should they? The current exhibit at the Whitney Humanities Center, “Book Jacket Design from the Yale University Press,” is a part of the Press’s centennial celebration. Continuing through Jan. 28, the show highlights cover designs from the past decade that have invited the reader to pick up the book in the first place.
Director of the Yale University Press John Donatich explained how elements of a book drive decisions about both the cover and the layout of its content.

In solitary confinement in Tilanqiao Prison, Lin Zhao wrote: “I’d rather die free / than a slave in prison be.” What makes such harrowing words all the more disturbing is that they were marked on the cell walls in her own blood. She wrote tens of thousands of vicious letters and poems condemning Communist dictatorship, which have been largely forgotten. She was impatient for change. Too impatient, perhaps: she was executed in 1968 at age 35.

What do you get when you combine a heartbroken guy, the modest daughter of a music executive, and two grimy exes? Somehow, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” manages to be more than just another teen movie.

The mass consumerism that drives our economy — encouraging you to buy that new cell phone with the built in PDA and GPS and that pink argyle sweater from J. Crew — is harming our community.

“Beginner’s Greek,” the debut novel from journalist James Collins, has been compared — both in its jacket copy and in early press coverage — to the novels of Jane Austen.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Readers may be most familiar with Geraldine Brooks for her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 novel “March,” which imagined the Civil War experience of Mr. March from “Little Women.” In her latest novel, “People of the Book,” Brooks tackles much less familiar territory, imagining the history of the (real) Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the earliest existing Jewish prayer books to use illuminated illustrations.

To fully appreciate Tom Perrotta’s ’83 latest novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” it helps to imagine that it is October 2004 again, in the final weeks of the presidential election.

Amid the “filleting” and “sawing” apart of arms, legs and pelvises going on all over during her first year of medical school, Pauline Chen — author of the memoir “Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality” and a former Yale-New Haven Hospital resident — begins to understand that she must “learn to separate [her] emotional self from [her] scientific self” if she is ever to “overcome death.” But it is also while dissecting a cadaver that Chen realizes the futility

On the night of Oct. 19, the Yale Bookstore played? host to the final act of a drama that has played itself out for nearly 40 years. Warren Kimbro — convicted murderer, ex-felon and, according to a new book by Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae, a changed man — offered a final apology.

Under a hot, tropical night sky, Jose Antonio Maria Vaz stands on a desolate rooftop, with his clothing in tatters, waiting for the world to end. He is the vagrant apostle known as the "Chronicler of the Winds." Henning Mankell opens his novel with...

I've always thought short stories were just something novelists did to pass the time. They express a creative urge, certainly, but nothing epic -- if the writer just eats a cookie, I imagine the urge will subside. To put it simply, when reading "The...

To the casual college-aged reader, Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" offers little appeal. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, recently issued in paperback, is anything but sexy. And yet, in a more perfect world, students would slide the novel into their...