I acquire far too many books, usually under the theory that I will get to all of them someday, “someday” being the most elastic of reading time frames. Some of my somedays have lasted decades, and ...

Mr. Giles is a novelist and the former executive Hollywood editor of Vanity Fair. Anyone who’s published a book or tried to has had even indispensable friends and family tell them why they’re not ...

You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human. What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an ...

“A writer,” Saul Bellow once observed, “is a reader moved to emulation.” But what if it’s also the other way around? What if, when we think about writing, we are actually teaching ourselves how to ...

All of us finish a great book and wish we could ask the author just one question. What did they really mean? How would they apply their advice today? With ChatGPT, I found a way to make that a reality ...