Books

She has an undeniable body of work, first-name-only recognition status, and now a Nobel Prize. Why is it so hard to love or hate Alice Munro’s writing in intellectual terms rather than personal ones?

“Love is complicated, if it exists,” the New Yorker staffer writes in his new book of essays, White Girls—an eminently tolerant and forgiving collection, even when it’s calling out the stupidity of the society that helped produce it.

Bad news: the San Diego anchorman probably didn’t actually write the new book attributed to him. He is, however, in good company—there’s a long literary tradition of notable works by phony writers.

Doris Lessing rarely behaved the way others would have liked her to. And yet many of Lessing's eulogists are missing the point why.