John Freeman

Outlegged by news networks that never sleep, outsold by the juggernaut of visual entertainment, the novel doesn't bring us the news as it once did. It's easy to think so until you read a book like Joseph O'Neill's splendid, "Netherland." This wholly...

Gore Vidal is one of America's most pugnacious, intelligent and politically engaged essayists, but until now, the only book of his essays readily available was "United States," a 1,000-page compendium the size of a phone book. This handier volume, neatly...

Questions of loyalty froth at the edges of Nam Le's muscular and impressive debut collection, "The Boat." In the title story, a young woman adrift on the South China Sea makes a horrifying decision about a sick child. "Tehran Calling" is about a young...

WEDNESDAY, MAY 14 Siri Hustvedt, "The Sorrows of an American" Barnes & Noble Tribeca, 7 p.m., FREE. In conversation with John Freeman. 97 Warren St., 212-587-5389 May 15 Heidi Julavits, "The Uses of Enchantment" Pete's Candy Store, 7:30 p.m, FREE....

Toward the end of Jhumpa Lahiri's mournful, deeply satisfying new collection of stories, two Bengali lovers visit a museum in an Italian town founded by Etruscrans. There, amidst dusty sarcophagi, they discover shelves lined with terra cotta urns...

For 25 years, Doris Lessing has lived in a small row house in a North London neighborhood that abuts the cemetery where Sigmund Freud is buried. Each morning, the 87-year-old Nobel prize winner rises at 5 a.m. and feeds several hundred birds. She then...

Novelists the world over struggle to find time to write, but few of them share the space constraints of Londoner Helen Oyeyemi, who wrote her debut novel, "The Icarus Girl" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95), at the age of 18. "I wrote this whole thing on...

Don't talk to Joe Craig about Gettysburg or Manassas. Not unless you want to hear the voluble, gray-ponytailed ranger at Saratoga National Historical Park denounce the Civil War as "the Budweiser of American history." Yes, the ranger confesses, as he...