"But, has anyone else been as creeped-out on this blog, as I've been lately?"

Says Jay Vogt , off topic, in the "Science of sitting" post. He continues: Over the past two days, we been presented with posts on...

The "inescapable shame of being a storyteller."

An enactment of shame, by Jonathan Franzen: Via David Haglund , who proceeds to further shame Franzen.

"Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose."

"It's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It's like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring T...

"When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place."

"The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring." Jonathan Franzen worries ...

Patti Smith nominated for a National Book Award.

For her memoir "Just Kids" about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. The boy I had met was shy and inarticulate. He liked t...

"A man was arrested after stealing author Jonathan Franzen's glasses from the writer and demanding a ransom of £100,000 ($158,808) at a book launch."

"Police said a helicopter was called to chase the culprit, who jumped into the Serpentine lake in London. The 27-year-old has since bee...

"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."

The 100 best first lines from novels... or so says American Book Review . The "truly" is the best part, right? Ah, I'm thinkin...

Poison and fiction.

Michiko Kakutani reviews Jonathan Franzen's new memoir -- "The Discomfort Zone" -- and seems rather horrified to gaze upon th...