“The moon is a desert. I have seen deserts,” Auden was fond of quipping.

  A few weeks ago, shortly after the news broke that the curator of the Guggenheim Museum had offered President Donald Trump a gold toilet as an artwork-commode for his private quarters in the White House, I found myself in Montreal, examining a t…

In 1861, Hugo signed with an upstart Belgian house in a record-shattering deal—widely regarded as the publishing coup of all time.

Last week, in an uncomfortable but enlightening coincidence, America was confronted with the two faces of its most ambiguous fictional hero, Atticus Finch.

Dickens the authorpreneur. Bigger than the Zuckerberg Bump, bigger even than the Colbert Bump or the Oprah Bump—arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump, triggered not by a tastemaker with a megaphone but a sh…