In our post-colonial age we cannot help but see a more complicated story, find a different reading experience in these lines than did the generations of Victorian school boys who were raised on visions of a civilizing empire.

Whatever else you could say about the young Jay McInerney, he was a damn good novelist. But it seems long past time to admit that, like his fictional avatar Russell Calloway, that early Jay McInerney is long gone, his place taken by an aging society wit, whose work, while never less than polished and professional, has lost its precious brightness.

Today, they say, we’re in a golden age of television, the vast free market of cable opening up new avenues for how moving picture stories come to be…Part of the thrust of Domini’s argument is that big screen filmmaking now finds itself threatened by its own creation, all those little screens like an army of ants taking down an elephant. 

Much of the book examines the strange process of alienation anyone might experience as they find themselves with time and space to interrogate their own behavior, private or otherwise.

In Brightfellow, Ducornet forces readers to experience the physicality of reading, to feel and taste the act of storytelling.

The ideal Florida Man story involves a woman named Crystal Metheny firing a missile into a car, while a South Florida Man story involves bodybuilding ex-soldiers getting their international Molly ring busted because of a pornstar's temper tantrum.

Klosterman's conversations with Neil deGrasse Tyson and string theorist Brain Greene prove to be fascinating, if creepy, measured discussions of whether life might be a simulation.

If novels are investigations into the workings of human existence -- shouldn’t a baby, and a baby’s arrival, provide a useful key?

Junger’s quick look at violence, trauma, and modern anomie omits important information, and as a result ends up on shaky ground, failing to consider counterpoints or bring its own arguments to a close.

Roach's writing is kinetic in the sense that it propels its readers forward, maintaining a speed and energy that keeps us turning the page, elongating a state of perpetual curiosity.

For Gaiman, the writing memoir is less about how to write and more about why we need writing.

When Ludo takes his magnificent brain to public school for the first time, and discovers the exquisite agony of being misunderstood by a world of simpletons, I feel like Helen DeWitt “gets” me.

Alexievich takes the jingoish caricature, the pulp-fiction rogue, the faceless millions of victims of historical record, and restores to them a voice -- their own.

There is so much I wish I could unknow about Emma Cline and her debut novel 'The Girls.'