John Updike

My first dog was a golden retriever named Tisha. Tisha was quiet and friendly, a perfect golden for a 4-year-old boy; my mother swears that when we took her to the vet one last time, as the dog lay dying on the operating table, Tisha lifted her head at...

Learning last year that Bob Boone, one of my former teachers at Highland Park High School (never mind when), was still teaching creative writing to children and adults filled me with the kind of joy you get when you return to your hometown decades later...

There's a certain type of reader — often also a writer, with a leaf-fring'd MFA — who has it all figured out. The realist novel is a scam, a factory producing cardboard imitations of bourgeois life. This is the person at the party who mentions...

We meet every six to eight weeks. More than half of our meetings are at local bars; the rest are at the host member's house. We are Chicago-based, 99 percent on the North Side. We do not read Oprah books! We are very proud of how diverse we are in...

"A poet," Louis Simpson once wrote, "should wish for enough unhappiness to keep him writing." Simpson may not have wished for trouble, but he kept writing for 60 years — spare, powerful poems about war, infidelity, suburban alienation and other...

The prospect of interviewing Don DeLillo produces a certain anxiety. DeLillo, one of the most heralded American novelists of the past 40 years, has a reputation for being inaccessible, emotionally and otherwise. While by no means a recluse like J.D....

If you were building a Chris Ware, if you were constructing the most celebrated cartoonist of the past couple of decades, drawing up the plans for an Oak Park illustrator so routinely referred to as a genius that the accolade is more like fact than...

Arguing over poetry's cultural relevance is a little like debating the potential effects of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, says Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. “For many people, poetry will remain remote,...

BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Michigan (AP) — For a man who built his career on word economy, the title is pretty darned long — The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Still, Elmore Leonard says he's...

-------------------- Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story Jim Holt Liveright: 310 pp., $27.95 -------------------- "How old is the Universe?" Kurt Vonnegut asked in his 1973 novel "Breakfast of Champions." "It is one half-second...

Sometimes Dave Eggers' accomplishments off the page can eclipse his literary talent. He has launched an energetic network of tutoring centers for young readers and writers —including Chicago's 826CHI — and established an innovative, socially...

-------------------- The Way the World Works Essays Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster: 319 pp., $25 -------------------- Nicholson Baker's new book, "The Way the World Works," is a miscellany: a collection of 34 essays originally published in...