J.T. Bushnell on Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game,” a “quintessentially American story, one that has roots in a literary tradition that dates back to Flaubert and Chekhov.”

Steven Wingate tackles his process on tackling the next project.

Not making any friends: Rachel Howard explores the “unlikable” narrator who won her over, despite efforts to the contrary, in Jean Rhys’ shrewd, heartbreaking, and pitiless novel Voyage in the Dark.

When Brian Bartels wasn’t writing or managing Fedora, the Greenwich Village bar and eatery that he co-owns with Gabriel Stulman, he spent 2012 trying to avoid the narcotic glow of his cell phone so he could spend more time reading. Here are the books that caught his attention last year.

Christopher Hitchens died on December 15th of 2011. In honor of the year anniversary of Hitchens’s passing, Nick Papandreou remembers his long-time friend and fellow writer.

How to make a plan for writing your novel by focusing on not writing your novel.

Got a dreadful first novel stashed somewhere in the proverbial drawer? Take heart, dear writer. Roberto Bolaño will show you how to salvage from the wreck.

Do early heroes stand the test of time? Hemingway may be a young writer’s writer … who still keeps you late at the bar.

Ray Bradbury’s Pulitzer-winning stories provide a portal back to childhood, and the ultimate SciFi shape-shifter: age.

A close encounter with a famous novelist in his twilight alters the course of a writer’s life.