The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal. * A Little-Known Occupational Hazard Affecting Writers: writing (or wanting to write) outside your field. * When Great Artists Dry...

“Never underestimate a writer’s vanity, especially that of a mediocre writer.” —Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game

“I think you have a duty to contribute, to go on contributing to what Gore Vidal calls ‘book chat.’ For certain self-interested reasons, you want to keep standards up so that when your next book comes out, it’s more likely that people will get the hang...

The Paris Review Interviews Vols. I – IV keep giving. In volume I, Borges says in a 1967 interview, “I’m going to deliver a course of lectures on poetry. And as I think that poetry is more or less untranslatable, and as I think English...

Interviewer: Do you think that the word processor has had or is having any effect on the study of literature? Bloom: There cannot be a human being who has fewer thoughts on the whole question of word processing than I do. I’ve never even seen a word...