The best-selling author died Thursday. She was 94. In 1987, James told Terry Gross that while the "shock of finding the bodies is important" in her novels, she personally doesn't like "messy lives."
Haruki Murakami's 2008 novella about a young student trapped in an eerie library has just been translated into English. Critic Alan Cheuse calls it awfully weird and utterly down to earth.
John Byrne Cooke was Janis Joplin's road manager from 1967 until her untimely death in 1970. So he saw a lot of rock history up close — and describes some of the details in a new memoir.
Austen Ivereigh, author of a new biography of Pope Francis, says the media have misjudged the pope's comments on abortion and homosexuality — but that Francis is a radical in other respects.
Texts from Jane Eyre imagines a Mr. Rochester who worries over his "attic wife" and a super flirty Scarlett O'Hara: "did you know that pantalets are out this year[?] that's why I'm not wearing any :)"
Poet laureate Mark Strand has died at age 80. He spurned conventional form and wrote spare and haunting prose, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999.
NYRB Classics has just reissued Tristana, an 1892 novel by the great Spanish author Benito Pérez Galdós. Critic Juan Vidal says Tristana's intelligence and emotional richness is comparable to Dickens.
Andrew Lawler's Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? explores the secret to the domesticated bird's success: "You can turn the chicken into almost anything," he says, from religious symbol to dinner.