The blurby back-cover declarations struck me as so off-pitch, that they in fact helped me to clarify for myself just what I think The Easter Parade is, and isn’t.

Dick isn’t out to crystallize a particular sentiment. He does not aim to be quotable—to be, in a word, reducible. Instead, his novels feel like labor, as though they are tabulating the results of some desperate experiment.

Pitch dirt onto a parent’s dead body and in that second understand that bits of dirt just became as much part of the parent as any other bit you might hold onto: a snapshot, a clock with bent hands, shoes still bearing the imprint of feet, ties scented with stale aspiration.

The first time was nerve-racking, a rush, but by the third book I was already settling in.  My browsing time shortened.  My forehead didn’t sweat.  I feared getting caught not because I was committing a punishable crime, but because I was committing a strange and possibly subversive act, because getting caught would force me to explain, to divulge my secret self.

If the “angriest black man in America” no longer hates you, Malcolm X's story seems to tell white people, then maybe you’re not all bad.

Soon after I started dating my future husband, I discovered that his father had written unpublished journals, named for his sons and his first grandson. In them, I learned the truth is complicated and nebulous and open to interpretation.

It was as though I'd been drawn to the Phillips de Pury auction house to visually complete the circuit of learning begun by Dyer's revelatory writings.  Which is not to say I wound up agreeing with everything Dyer had to say. Far from it.

Whenever there are bright lights, clusters of cameras and microphones, spin doctors and handlers, packs of hungry rivals with notebooks, the writer's chances of getting something genuine, or even merely unique, shrink monstrously.  I experienced this so many times that it is one of the few things I absolutely know to be true.

The Assault, probably Harry Mulisch’s most well known work, is to my mind the best account ever written of being a non-Jew in an occupied Nazi territory.

The crisis Franzen described 15 years ago this month would seem doubly urgent for today’s young writers, yet twentysomethings are entering the literary arena in droves. The question’s not “Why Bother?” but “What gives?”

Professor X knows first-hand that if you refuse to keep score, if you don't set standards, if you promote students simply for trying, you will produce mediocrity, or worse. But don't just take his word for it.

He was a tactician, poet, zoologist, melon enthusiast, Muslim, and badass.  He was also the author of the Baburnama, an autobiography unprecedented in its milieu.