At Slate, Katy Waldman asks a simple question: what the heck is the point of the National Book Awards, anyway?
And the Pulitzer, What’s Up with That?
Autism as a Literary Device
Susan Sontag once wrote that the truest way to portray illness was without metaphor. Our own Marie Myung-Ok Lee takes a look at autism in recent literature and the ways its writers (ranging from Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and Louise Erdrich) have often reduced those with autism to a literary construct.
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Art & Illness
At the Guardian, Brian Dillon writes about great creative minds who had fertile imaginations for the maladies that befell them.
Striking New Book Covers
The cover art for some highly anticipated forthcoming novels has been unveiled. Both C by Tom McCarthy and Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis are sporting eye-catching designs.
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Connecting the Dots
How did commas, colons, dashes, and question marks come into existence? Keith Houston writes for BBC about the history of punctuation.