From CLR, Julia Braun Kessler on Manhattan, school for scriveners. What's in a name: Literary history could have been dramatically different if some classics had been published under their working titles. Here's an annotated list of 61 essential postmodern reads. With book tours mostly a thing of the past, the only folks who will be going out on tour are the most famous authors — the ones who hate book tours. Literary Death Match is a kind of X-Factor for books, the latest American cultural import, driven by a really refreshing optimism. Mono-highbrow: The Norton Anthology of World Literature: The Twentieth Century is not bad, no worse than the others — the problem is the century itself, anyway, not the anthology. Titles within a tale: Novelists who invent fictional novels — with their own obsessive readers — may be making a hedge against oblivion. A posthumous dispute over a writer’s legacy: A battle over the estate of the Hungarian playwright and novelist Ferenc Molnar spans generations, continents, religions and sensibilities. Julian Baggini meets the debut philosophical novelist Lucy Eyre. A Lost Art: What happened to Christian literature? The Untouchables: Antoni Cimolino on why it's blasphemous to alter Shakespeare's words for a modern audience.
