The calamities of John Fante’s career are well known and threaten to overtake his fiction as the most important element of his life.

Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?

Fictional narratives of the duel conveniently bolstered contemporary desire. Think about it: would you rather believe you were enforcing an ancient honor code or acknowledge the fact that your murderous desire is barbarous and shameful?

The experience, whatever the intellectual payoff, is inevitably tinged with a feeling of troubling complicity: Am I self-hating? A pervert? Does having gotten something out of that movie make me "a bad person"?

As an English professor and unabashed therapy-junkie, I recently made it my business to read every YA novel I could find in which an adolescent protagonist visits a psychotherapist.

Jacobs’ message is simple: a city, and thus a society, lives and dies by how well it can build a creative environment for its citizens to innovate their way out of trouble.

It was during the summer of 2009 that I first read the opening paragraph to German novelist Peter Handke’s 1970 novel, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. It remains the most tantalizingly confusing paragraph I’ve ever read.

As I finalized revisions to my book, I wondered how readers’ perceptions of the place I had spent years writing about were possibly being shaped by the antics of people named Snooki and The Situation.

Sometime after he died, I had what I think we literary types call an epiphany. My father was a fan. I hadn’t known. Or if I’d known, I hadn’t thought of it that way.

I asked all the readers I could for their recommendations of “alternative,” “adventurous,” “unusual,” “non-canonical,” or just “weird” Los Angeles novels.

In April 2001, I was offered the most interesting part-time job I’ve ever had. For $7.25 an hour I began working at my local airport.

By 8:47 AM on September 11, 2001, a lot had already happened at our house. My first thought was, there goes my goddamn morning. And I almost didn’t leave my study.

Let me just say, with as much un-dotty enthusiasm as I can muster, that I am, like, way super excited about the histo-fi seminar I’m teaching this fall, “(Re)Imagining Lives.”

Notes on the French novelist Irène Némirovsky, her "violent masterpiece" Suite Française, and the imaginary memoir written by her daughter.