In Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, there is murder, but more important, there is the pretentious, erudite, and dryly funny writer who tells us about it.

One of literature’s most seductive questions was asked by the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai in “Embers,” his exquisite novel of friendship and betrayal, published in Budapest in 1942, but not translated into English until 2001, 12 years after his death. “Do you want it to be the way it used to be?” a woman asks a man. “Yes,” he responds.“Exactly the same. The way it was last time.” This exchange occurs not between lovers but between a 91-year-old servant and the 75-year-old general she nursed as a baby, in whose household she has remained. The general wants her to set

It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the US Championship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that point but it had been obvious for years that he was destined to become a legendary figure. His book My 60 Memorable Games was one of my earliest and most treasured chess possessions.

Want to write a breakout first novel? The conventional wisdom says ingratiate yourself (Everything Is Illuminated), grab the reader by the lapels (The Lovely Bones), or put on an antic show (Special Topics in Calamity Physics). Teju Cole’s disquietingly powerful debut Open City does none of the above. It’s light on plot. It’s exquisitely written, but quiet; the sentences don’t call attention to themselves. The narrator, a Nigerian psychiatry student, is emotionally distant, ruminative, and intellectual.

In early 2008, Joyce Carol Oates gave a talk called “The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration,” about how writers go about transmuting painful life experiences into art. At the heart of her speech was a quote from Hemingway, which Oates found so profound that she cited it twice. “From things that have happened . . . and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if

The history of French literature is rich in villainy, calumny, and public enemies. Francois Villon was a noted thief, and his famous call to universal fraternity (“Oh my human brothers”) was composed while he awaited hanging. The Marquis de Sade was jailed by five successive regimes for everything from poisoning a prostitute to inciting political unrest (the day before the storming of the Bastille where he was held prisoner, he stood on the ramparts of the fortress screaming, “Kill all the guards!” before getting so worked up he started yelling, “Kill all the prisoners!”). Lautréamont wrote about shooting shipwreck survivors

When Elizabeth Bishop took on the job of New Yorker poetry critic in 1970, she wrote to her doctor Anny Baumann, “Writing any kind of prose, except an occasional story, seems to be almost impossible to me—I get stuck, am afraid of making generalizations that aren’t true, feel I don’t know enough, etc., etc.” She failed to file a single review for three years, at which point The New Yorker decided to act as if the appointment had never occurred, so they could keep a good relationship with Bishop, who had been publishing poetry with the magazine for thirty years.

There are more than four thousand charter schools in the United States, but there’s only one that tries to mimic a video game. At Quest to Learn, which serves sixth through twelfth graders in New York City, students get little of traditional homework, lectures, studying, or even grades. Instead, they engage in goal-oriented “missions,” supposedly accumulating knowledge and skills across disciplines while, say, pretending to be an adviser to the Spartan government during the Peloponnesian War. As in a video game, they progress at more or less their own pace, and there’s never anything as definitive as a permanent score

Nobody, so far as I know, calls Carl Dennis a great innovator, and I would not trust anybody who did. Insofar as he has distinctive gifts—and he certainly does—they are gifts firmly opposed to great innovation, to major endeavors of any sort. It is in the minor efforts, the daily or weekly rewards and tasks that make up most of any life, that Dennis finds his métier.

Neoconservatism has not become a term of opprobrium. It has always been one. The socialist leader Michael Harrington deployed it in the early 1970s to disparage the intellectual backsliders from liberalism, and the word gained a currency it has never lost. Earl Shorris later published a scathing critique of neoconservatism called Jews Without Mercy. As neocon founding father Irving Kristol, who died in 2009, observes in an essay now collected in The Neoconservative Persuasion, his early abandonment of liberalism and vote for Richard Nixon were seen by many of his peers as “the equivalent of a Jew ostentatiously eating pork

Kate Briggs’s wonderful translation finally makes available in English a most unusual book by one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. Although the three lecture series were posthumously published in French in the order they were given, Columbia University Press have brought out the final course before the first one (How To Live Together, their translation of the second appeared in 2005) – an indication