Dan Slater’s parents met through Contact, Inc., a matchmaking service that debuted in 1965 and went defunct soon after—though not before the two college students paid $4 each and filled out Contact’s 100-question personality test. A rented mainframe computer nicknamed Eros tallied up their responses and concluded they were well-suited. And thus a Harvard boy got introduced to a Mount Holyoke girl.

Jim Crace’s new novel, set in an unspecified part of rural England during an unspecified time that might be the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, begins with two pillars of smoke – an appropriately biblical turn. One of these announces that, somewhere within the boundaries of the tiny village where Harvest is set, new settlers have arrived: the law “gives the right of settlement and cedes a portion of our share to any vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it”. The other column of smoke comes from the manor

Since my fiction is usually about people, and I consider sex one of the more important and emotionally fascinating activities people undertake, sometimes I must run the gauntlet of writing a sex scene. The results vary, though I try to make a habit of not publishing the many occasions when things don't work. "Don't worry," I console myself, stroking my arm. "It happens."

How to classify Artful, the latest offering from Scottish writer Ali Smith? An introductory note declares the book to be a faithful adaptation of the four Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature she delivered at Oxford last winter, but Artful is far from a rigorous academic talk; its literary criticism comes in the form of a fictional soliloquy of yearning. The premise is this: In a house in London, a woman mourning the death of her partner turns to their shared library for distraction from loss, only to find that her beloved has come back, unannounced, for a visit. The satisfactions

Courage to today's aspiring rock star. In 1967, The Byrds could afford to be gently cynical about pop-music acclaim. After all, they'd made a fortune by transforming Dylan's folk song “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a jangly pop tune delivered with a crooked smile. But what should an aspiring rock star do today?

Biographers of Sylvia Plath take on a daunting task: Who could ever write as much or as well about Plath as Plath did? Plath was obsessed with re-creating her life’s story, which she not only transmuted into poetry and fiction but wrestled with in a staggering volume of personal writing. In the overflowing margins of leather-bound pocket calendars, across thousands of pages of journal entries and letters, Plath described the minutia of her days sometimes down to the hour, sparing no one from her exacting, critical eye. Plath’s story can even be divined through an incredible store of the stuff