Philip Roth

Sad news  about the death of Nora Ephron at 71. Here's my interview with her in 1992 on her directing debut, "This Is My Life."   BY FRANK RIZZO Nora Ephron is after those flashes of truth in movies, when suddenly there's a shock of recognition and...

A new book festival will launch this summer in a hard-to-reach but beautiful part of Washington state....

Our story Our book club started meeting 48 years ago and we've been discussing books ever since. The original members were young, married women who'd just had their first children and wanted to stay intellectually active. Over the course of almost five...

The lineup for the 2012 National Book Festival in Washington DC has been announced....

"Does she or doesn't she?" — the innuendo-filled catchphrase for Clairol from 1956 easily could have been conceived by "Mad Men's" Don Draper. It was not, of course, but rather was penned by one of the few female copywriters of her day. Jane Maas,...

It takes a certain kind of genius to create a century full of characters — including an unforgettable Thomas Cromwell and an impetuous Henry VIII — and give each a distinctive voice and a fully formed personality. Simon Slater more than...

There is a hierarchy of personal catastrophe, an informal but definitive ranking of all the terrible things that can happen, moving through categories that might be labeled "Worst Thing" to "Next-Worst Thing" to "Next-to-Next Worst Thing" and on down...

2011's Bad Sex in Fiction award went to David Guterson's "Ed King," a modern retelling of the Oedpius story....

There should be a Biblical saying — For if a new novel, for which the publisher has paid an enormous amount of cash, lives up to its hype, all shall considered themselves blessed — and if that novel cometh from the Midwest, homeland to Floyd...

Our book club began in 1988. We meet monthly for dinner and discussion. We alternate meetings between Chicago and Oak Park. The name of our club has changed a couple of times. Now we've settled on The Bonza! Bookclub (from "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil...

The second-greatest mystery ever to come out of Sweden – the first being "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and its novelistic siblings by the late Stieg Larsson – is the annual speculation about who will receive the Nobel Prize in literature....