What children's book character do Noam Chomsky, Newt Gingrich, and Hugh Hefner share an affection for? Readers of this blog will remember our asking that question a couple of weeks ago, when we learned that the philosopher, the politician, and the playboy had exhibited an unexpected consensus on their favorite childhood reading. Read more...

Expertise has its own special allure. Years ago, a good friend bestowed on me the gift of The French Laundry Cookbook. Now, I will probably never undertake most of its involved, precise and fascinating recipes -- the time to do so just isn't there -- but I'm mesmerized by the insight into how Thomas Keller's genius turns ingredients into high art (Adam Gopnik's recent demurrals about cookbooks aside). I could say the same thing about the fascinating detail a writer like William Langesweiche gives into the work of keeping a plane aloft: I'd never try to reproduce it, but the sliver of illumination into the pilot's work is one of the most delightful reading experiences. Read more...

Last night, at the 60th National Book Awards Ceremony and Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, the winner of the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction -- chosen by the more than 10,000 readers who voted on the National Book Foundation's website -- was announced: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor. Read more...

This has been a terrific year for collections of short fiction, as one of our contributors reminded me last evening: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; Wells Towers's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned; James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt; Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness; Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes; Ha Jin's forthcoming A Good Fall; John Updike's valedictory My Father's Tears (and the first complete issue of my own favorite sequence in that author's work, The Maples Stories). But the most notable volume of recently published short fiction on my shelf at the moment collects works more than a century old. Read more...

A copy of Ben Yagoda's fascinating Memoir: A History -- no, it's not the story of author's life, but a rich and thought-provoking study of the history of that curious genre -- landed on the desk today. I haven't had time to fully take in its many pleasures, but leafing through I was very happy to see the attention the author gives to one of my personal favorites -- Edmund Gosse's melancholy masterpiece Father and Son. Read more...

To commemorate the take-down of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, 1000 symbolic dominoes were toppled along the Wall’s route on Monday. It’s an appropriate metaphor. The staccato tumble recognizes the complex interplay of influences that tipped one-upon-another to create the final flattening. Here are five books and one movie that shed some retrospective light, through two decades, on a cleaved city and the Wall itself. All of them reach beyond its brute symbolism to chronicle -- imaginatively, memoiristically, and historically -- deeper truths. Read more...

It sounds like a bad joke, except the punchline is really funny. A politician, a playboy, and a philosopher walk into a bookstore, and are asked to pick the book they remember most warmly from their childhoods. If you ask me, there is no better evidence of the shared culture of books than the fact that when Newt Gingrich, Hugh Hefner, and Noam Chomsky were asked the question by the Little Auction That Could (more on that below), they expressed a fondness for the same characters and the same imaginative world. Read more...

They probably saw it coming: Publishers Weekly is catching some flak for its list of the 10 best books of 2009, all of which were written by men. "We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration," explains the magazine's reviews director, Louisa Ermelino, introducing the list, which includes Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply and Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, among other man-made works. The magazine deliberately ignored gender, she writes, but allows, "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

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The composer John Adams, who proved himself a deft writer in his autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, published last year and out in paperback in a couple of weeks, has found a new home for his prose in the Hellmouth blog at his site, earbox.com. Read more...

Fascinating post last week on Jonah Lehrer's blog, The Frontal Cortex, inspired by Marco Roth's n+1 essay, "The Rise of the Neuronovel." Lehrer takes issue with Roth's thesis that "neurological" novelists -- e. g., the Ian McEwan of Saturday and the Richard Powers of The Echo Maker -- have ceded their ground (and their idea of character) to science. Read more...

The Internet once again solves a problem you didn't know you had -- tracing the tangled family relationships among the gods and goddesses of Greek myth. With this handy chart from ludios.org one can not only retrace the lines of parentage among those very busy deities, demigods, monsters and heroes, but connect back to the Wikipedia page for the mythical personage in question (which in turn leads to more delightful connections: If you've ever wondered where the three-headed hell-hound Cerebrus came from, click on the link for Typhon.) Read more...

With Halloween in mind, I was thinking back over books we reviewed this year that fulfill the seasonal need for a "chilling" read. One stands out: White is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. Read more...

Over on one of our favorite websites, Crooked Timber, there's a been a fascinating discussion going on, inspired by Christopher Hayes' recent review of Ralph Nader's "practical utopia" Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! [Click here to see the conversation on Crooked Timber]. Crooked Timber contributor Henry Farrell, in commenting on the review, raised the question " of whether there are any genuinely good, genuinely political novels out there." Read more...

Christopher Byrd writes: "In my reading life, I seldom encounter contemporary novels that impress me as natty candidates for a high school curriculum. Hang it on to the fact that I'm partial to both complex, stylistically-challenging books which I'd be reluctant to inflict on overly-scheduled, poorly-rested young people, and to narratives packed with bad role models e.g. the Philip Roth stand-ins of the world who are ill-equipped to put parents at ease." Read more...

Karadzic on trial: War crimes tribunals are a public theater of accountability, retribution, and hoped-for healing. Victims and survivors bear witness as metaphorical, and often metaphysical, Greek choruses. Read more...

Reading Rolfe Humphries's very fine translation of Lucretius's ancient epic of physics, philosophy, and Epicurean wisdom, De Rerum Natura (The Way Things Are in Humphries's rendering), written in the first century BC. In addition to the poet's didactic and imaginative survey of atomism, the senses, death, sex, the development of the universe, and pestilence -- the work ends with an unforgettable evocation of plague-ridden Athens -- The Way Things Are exudes a bracing familiarity with the apprehensions of our own age of anxiety. Read more...

Richard Powers on his latest novel: "Generosity is a pure fiction and something of a social satire, one that traces how evolutionary genetics and the idea of determinism propagate through society with lots of errors in transcription at every step. But I wanted to be informed enough about the real science behind the story’s genomics to write meaningfully about a society that continues to move farther along from chance to choice... " Read more...

Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, recently reviewed Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder for The B&N Review, noting that it swept her into "riding happily with its heroes through a blaze of adventures and ideas." [See her full review here.] She sent us this enlightening note recently about the passage of a reviewer's work into other languages Read more...

There are certain projects that set a fan's heart afire. The Simpsons : An Uncensored, Unauthorized History is one of them. John Ortved's ambitious undertaking is to piece together the history of one of the few programs that's been both a global hit and a monument to how smart and satisfying television can be. Read more...

Are you ready to join in a little experiment? Then come along with me on Twitter as I interview David Pogue -- the prolific author, New York Times technology columnist and maker of occasional music videos. Read more...

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist. We are, sadly, unfamiliar with her work, which frequently dealt with the experience of totalitarian oppression and exile. Her novel, The Land of Green Plums, a tale of youth corroded by the oppressions of Ceausescu's police state, is issued by Northwestern University Press. Other works include The Appointment. Read more...

Despite the continentally-correct judgment of the Olympicrats in Copenhagen, Chicago is an Olympian city when it comes to literature and the arts. And what better time than now to remind us? Here's a sampling of some of those triumphs of the sedentary, each of which required sweat, struggle, and, of course, the building of stadiums of the mind. Read more...

My neighbor this weekend was having a yard sale, and local comics buffs were snapping up battered but still readable (and possibly Ebay-able) copies of everything from Conan the Barbarian to The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. That brought to mind a few wonderful comics titles that have crossed the desk of late. Read more...

Katharine Harmon's You Are Here, an ingenious exploration of the border-bending speculative capabilities of mapmaking, was published six years ago, and remains a book I love losing myself in from time to time. Gathering a few score exhibits-an estate outlined from a dog's perspective, a map of success, and assorted "personal geographies" -- created by artists and cartographers, it is nourishing food for one's imagination. Read more...

We're delighted to learn, courtesy of the New York Times, that PEN USA has announced that it will be bestowing its Lifetime Achievement Award upon Elmore Leonard at a ceremony to be held in Beverly Hills in early December. Read more...

We're pleased to note that B&N Review contributor Maud Newton has been awarded Narrative's annual prize for work from an emerging writer. Read more...

Check out one of our favorite videos from the National Book Award-anniversary celebration: Harold Augenbraum's literary criticism at Twitter Speed! Read more...

For the dedicated Edward Gorey fanatic, check out this collection of "still photos and publicity images for Christopher Seufert's upcoming documentary project about the late illustrator Edward Gorey. Shot with him between 1996 and his death in April, 2000." Read more...

In the midst of last week's launch of our redesigned site, I missed one bit of welcome news -- Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder was awarded the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Read more...

To celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation announced a campaign to select the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction. We're taking part with an exclusive series of video conversations about the six finalists, plus fascinating essays about each of the fiction award winners -- from 1950 to now. Read more...