Now a book of the same title.

Quoted:As a natural-born child of the meritocracy, I'd been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations meetings and model state governments and student congresses, and I knew only one direction: forward, onward. I lived for prizes, praise, distinctions, and I gave no thought to any goal higher or broader than my next report card. Learning was secondary; promotion was primary. No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient. What else was there?

Quoted: We laughed at the notion of "authorial intention" and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate ... we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we'd never constructed in the first place

Quoted: Wray, thirty-seven, has written three books, and each one is wholly different in location and genre, as well as in tone. But there is a distinctive undercurrent that runs through all his work, an attention to stylistic detail unheard of among young novelists today.

Finalists: Joe Meno, Tobias Wolff, Jhumpa Lahiri

Quoted: For a literary honor that didn’t exist before 2004, the Story Prize — which recognizes the best story collection to be published each year — has quickly established itself as a nifty jewel in a writer’s crown.

Quoted: “I wanted it to be an art object,” he explained. “I really saw it as the anti-Kindle.” When Dark asked him about the book’s illustrations

Quoted:“It was as if, drowning in air, she had leaped toward ether.” In the same novel, the narrator imagines her grandmother pinning sheets to a clothesline, on a windy day—“Say that when she had pinned three corners to the lines it began to billow and leap in her hands, to flutter and tremble, and to glare with the light, and that the throes of the thing were as gleeful and strong as if a spirit were dancing in its cerements.”

quoted: “You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it’s just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was.”

Long article for later

Quoted: Wallace began to doubt the aspect of his work that many readers admired most: his self-consciously maximalist style. He was known for endlessly fracturing narratives and for stem-winding sentences adorned with footnotes that were themselves stem-winders. Such techniques originally had been his way of reclaiming language from banality, while at the same time representing all the caveats, micro-thoughts, meta-moments, and other flickers of his hyperactive mind.

Quoted: The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since Dec. 2, 2007, when we published our previous Notables list.

Quoted: Search through the cultural collections of Europe, connect to other user pathways and share your discoveries

James Woods reviews Rivka Galchen's first novel.

Quoted: That was the stage of loss I was in then I suppose, like the first days after someone dies, when you bend down to pick up every piece of lint, and you wonder what the dead person, when you meet her next, might have to say about her death (or about lint), and you worry, a little bit, about how that is going to be a very awkward conversation, the conversation with the recently dead.

Short stories & essays by Wallace; videos, interviews, reviews...

Quoted: used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose; his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.