On Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

The oracular works of Philip K. Dick.

On writing what you loathe. Leslie McFarlane, ghostwriter of the early Hardy Boys novels, was so ashamed of the work he couldn’t even bring himself to name the books in his diary. “June 9, 1933: Tried to get at the juvenile again today but the ghastly job appalls me.”

On the Cairo knifing of 82-year-old Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and its aftermath.

On Mark Twain’s recently released memoir.

On the language of hobos and the dictionaries it spawned.

J.D. Salinger on the beaches on D-Day, marching through concentration camps, and in liberated Paris.

A 2000 speech on the impossibility of all forms of exile, particularly literary.

A profile of the director, written from the set of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

On Huck Finn, the book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and the evolution of language and race in America.

The fever-dream life and death of Chinese poet Gu Cheng.

“Fiction writers are good people, usually. There’s a lot of pretenders, but I haven’t met a lot of sons of bitches.”

In 1926, at the age of 12, Barbara Follett published a critically acclaimed novel. Fourteen years later, she disappeared.

A profile of the late artist and author Norris Church Mailer, who stayed with her husband Norman despite his notorious philandering.

On America’s two literary fiction cultures and why one will endure.

The team of assistants that made Gandhi.

Jay-Z on his new book Decoded, his parents’ record collection, and the real reason rappers have a tendency to grab their junk on stage.

On the BBC radio addresses of E.M. Forster: “For one thing, he won’t call what he is doing literary criticism, or even reviewing. His are ‘recommendations’ only. Each episode ends with Forster diligently reading out the titles of the books he has dealt with, along with their exact price in pounds and shillings.”

James Frey is starting a publishing company, paying young writers (very poorly) to reverse engineer a Twilight-esque hit.

Booker winner Howard Jacobson on the bumper crop of sex worker memoirs and what they say about our understanding of paid sex.

An interview with R. Crumb on how he adapted Genesis into comic form.

Eleven books into his planned thirteen book The Wheel of Time cycle, the most popular fantasy series since Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan saw death on his own horizon and planned accordingly. A 31-year-old former Mormon missionary inherited his universe.

How a childhood gorilla-hunting safari and a string of sexless marriages led Alice Sheldon to become reclusive sci-fi legend James Tiptree Jr.

David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”

An interview with William Gibson on the “dark, dark world of marketing, advertising, and trend forecasting.”