Brendan Bernhard

Photo by Ian GittlerI’ve been spotted. “I knew it was you,” Bret Easton Ellis says shortly after taking a seat at Cafe Loup, a deserted restaurant in downtown Manhattan, at lunchtime. “I said, ‘Who’s that guy I’m starting to follow? I bet you it’s him.’ ” Then Ellis, the noted......

Illustration by John E. MinerWhat with the terrorist bombings in London, and the growing specter of a multiculturalism experiment beginning to fall apart, Rupert Thomson’s dystopian novel about Great Britain, Divided Kingdom, ought to be perfectly timed. (The cover, a cubistic photo-collage, shows a shattered Big Ben.) Then there’s the......

Photo by Stephen HydeThe thought of suicide has gotten one through many a bad night, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed, tossing and turning. In A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby has written a novel about four people for whom the thought of suicide is no longer sufficient consolation for......

Photo by Brendan BernhardThe Central Intelligence Agency has been good to Harry Mathews, even if he never belonged to it and hated what it came to represent. My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973, his novel-cum-memoir about pretending to be a spy, has been flying off the shelves of......

Looking at the photograph of the young Robert Crumb, together with three of his neatly dressed siblings, at Disneyland in 1955, I thought to myself, “What a sweet bunch of kids!” (On closer inspection, they appeared to be frowning, but still...) Reproduced in The R. Crumb Handbook, this sepia-tinged slice......

Photo by Jay Muhlin“I am probably the most hated writer in America,” says Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s not hard to figure out why. For his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, he was paid an advance of $500,000 — a colossal sum for a then 24-year-old unknown in a financially strapped......

Illustration by Curt CrawshawWith the runaway success of 2001’s Atonement on his résumé, not to mention 1998’s Booker Prize winner, Amsterdam, Ian McEwan has now officially been installed as Britain’s King of Fiction. Former rivals, such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, have slipped, while Julian Barnes is perhaps too......