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It Takes More Than Who, What and Why to Get You Where You Want to Go.

Ian McEwan is among the most heavily studied and analysed authors alive, but that doesn't mean he's a fan of modern academic studies of literature. He feels literary theory these days “has taken a perverse, pseudo-scientific turn,” and this attempt to turn literature into a science leaves him cold. “Literary theory,” he says, “always struck me as a fabulous waste of time.” Ouch.

David Baddiel is suspicious about translations. While you can immediately tell that a work has been translated, he says, you have no idea how good the translation really is. And how do you know that, after slogging through 430 pages, the translator didn’t feel the inclination to improve on the original? Given Baddiel’s examples, such suspicions are not unfounded.

Are you a political expert? Or are you misinformed? These five levels of awareness will show you where you stand.

Here's a neat article about travel poetry with some neat examples of good poetry books used to explain.

The Utopia of one world library is not to be. There will be no encyclopedic record of human experience as fortold by the prophets of the wired world, despite the efforts of corporate giants to digitize the world’s books. When all’s said and done, knowledge will still be “embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.”

A conversation between Cormac McCarthy and filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen in which you get to find out which movies the author thinks are winners and that he’s not a fan of magical realism.

Martin Wagner says “the undiscovered writer is the acceptable victim of a system which, ironically, works for everyone concerned except for the very people who are its lifeblood”. After headaches brought on by a string of ineffectual agents, Wagner took responsibility for his own success, and he has some interesting things to say about the writer/agent relationship.

Do you keep books in the trunk of your car in case of an emergency? Brian Doyle does, and he took a survey to find out if he was alone. He wasn’t…not by a long shot. Here are some of the oddest titles ever to be kept in the boot.

Note: If you get a sign-in page, just click ‘Outside the US’ to bypass it.

Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner wasn’t an immediate success as a movie. Box office obscurity’s not a problem anymore though; his children are seeing to that. One interesting project is a biopic of the author which will “intertwine Dick's life story with scenes from his final and unfinished novel.” Also, somewhere there’s an android with Philip K. Dick’s face and personality.