Second Reads: Elizabeth Hardwick on Italo Svevo

Sorry Entertainers: Damon Krukowski on outsider music

Coffee Table: Barry Schwabsky and Andy Grundberg on art and photo monographs

Behind the Muse: Scott Westerfeld on ghostwriting

First Novels by Paul West

Fiction Forecast by Jonathan Bing

Interview: John Ashbery talks with Lee Smith

Block Party: David Gates on the writer's process

Mary Gaitskill on Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, "Rabbit Remembered," by John Updike

Wayne Koestenbaum on Goethe's Faust, Part I, translated by Randall Jarrell, illustrations by Peter Sís

Judith Moore on Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, by Anne Sexton, edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George

Elissa Schappell on The Quick and the Dead, by Joy Williams

Rick Moody on The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson

Jeff Giles on Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

Jonathan Lethem on When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Peter Griffin on F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Jackson R. Bryer

Francine Prose on Romanticism and Its Discontents, by Anita Brookner

Rob Spillman on On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, by Peter Handke

Robert Polito on Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes

Craig Seligman on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, by Michael Chabon

Greil Marcus on How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life: Stories, by John Fahey

Peter Plagens on Tales from the Art Crypt: The Painters, the Museums, the Curators, the Collectors, the Auctions, the Art, by Richard Feigen

Geoff Dyer on Writing on Drugs, by Sadie Plant

Luc Sante on Boring Postcards and Boring Postcards U.S.A., collected by Martin Parr

David Thomson on The Grove Book of Hollywood, edited by Christopher Silvester

Geoffrey O'Brien on This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1967-1968, by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu

Anderew Ross on Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City, by Mike Davis

Molly Nesbit on á l'infinitif, a typotranslation by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk of Marcel Duchamp's White Box, translated by Jackie Matisse, Richard Hamilton, and Ecke Bonk

Jane Harris on Peter Halley: Maintain Speed, edited by Cory Reynolds

F.L. Rush on Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, translated by Steven Rendall

Tiffany Lee Brown on A Whore Just Like the Rest: The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer, by Richard Meltzer

Jonathan Ames on Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

Dennis Cooper on You Can't Win, by Jack Black