Joan Didion

In the latest fracas over literary sexism, Claire Messud objected to a comment an interviewer made about whether she would want to be friends with the main character of her new novel, The Woman Upstairs.

The interviewer asks: "I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.”

And Messud answers:

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? …

James Patterson is in no need of a bailout. The author of bestsellers including “Along Came a Spider” and “Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas” currently occupies spots on four different New York Times bestseller lists with three discrete books. (Those would be “Alex Cross, Run”; “Now You See Her,” written with Michael Ledwidge; and “I, Michael Bennett,” written with Ledwidge also.)

Despite his success in a strain of genre fiction not often recommended in classrooms, Patterson has become, suddenly, the closest thing the publishing industry has to an ambassador. The multimillion-seller author placed an ad last weekend in the New York

The New York Review of Books announces plans for its 50th Anniversary with a year marked by special events, launching with a large public event at Town Hall on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 that will include contributors Michael Chabon, Joan Didion, John Banville, Mary Beard, Daniel Mendelsohn, Darryl Pinckney, and Mark Danner. In February of 1963, the Review published its first lone issue amid one of the most vexing strikes in American history, a printer’s strike that shut down seven New York City newspapers.