Jean-Paul Sartre

In her eyes, they are all daughters and sisters. The waifish 18-year-old, already married and a mother, but with a hunger to learn. The pair of shy high school students, nervous at first, but soon browsing eagerly through the bookshelves. The matronly...

Halloween has come and gone, and Anne Rice has a new book — a memoir in fact — that's climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then. Normal if it were 1994 — the height of Rice's megaselling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic...

Question: What prize was recently characterized by one of its winners as "mundane"? a) Radio-Active Car Audio's "Loudest Car Stereo" contest. b) The International Federation of Competitive Eating's World Tamale Eating Championship. c) The Nobel Prize....

In 1953, Hugh Hefner was a young man in Chicago with an unimpressive résumé and big plans. He would start a men's magazine geared toward young urbanites such as himself, with lifestyle tips and racy pictures. He would call it "Stag Party." A legal...

Charlotte Kohler, who helped shape the path of literature as the longtime editor of the small but influential Virginia Quarterly Review, died Sept. 15 of congestive heart failure at her home in Charlottesville, Va. She was 99 and died one day before her...

Barney Rosset, the publisher and First Amendment defender whose battles on behalf of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and other explicit works helped overturn U.S. censorship laws, has won an honorary National Book Award for "Outstanding Service to the...

Abitter political-cultural confrontation that exploded in Nicaragua in late August could mark the final end of the passionate romance between the world's leftist intellectuals and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Ortega, you may recall, was the leader...

Woman of Rome A Life of Elsa Morante Lily Tuck Harper: 272 pp., $25.95 IF ELSA MORANTE and her husband, Alberto Moravia, had been French rather than Italian, "they would have been as much celebrated as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,"...

"Beijing Encounter," Lonely Planet, $11.99; ISBN: 978-1-74104-666-3 Lonely Planet's Encounter series consists of compact pocket guides for city visitors on a tight sightseeing schedule. Each is designed to enable the traveler to "discover twice the...

Young people are constantly being warned that the information they include in their Facebook profiles could eventually come back to haunt them. Photographs of bacchanalian escapades, catastrophic sartorial decisions or intimate moments with toothless,...

What Was Lost A Novel Catherine O'Flynn Henry Holt: 256 pp., $14 paper I don't know of any art form that has been declared dead more often than the realist novel. Even the term "realist novel" is a kind of pejorative -- don't we want something more...

Here's a line from the Gloucester County media release about Thursday night's York District town hall meeting: 'There will also be an opportunity to share comments, concerns, or questions about county-related issues.' So much for that. At about 7:45 p.m....