Before they were stars: the wayward youth of Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and more. (And it was wayward!)

Bookish, a new website created by Penguin, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster, has launched. Check out Elizabeth Gilbert’s riposte to Philip Roth! 

How one man saved eight thousand precious volumes amid the violence in Timbuktu. 

We are psyched about the new Believer podcast, The Organist. 

A. L. Kennedy: “From here I can see the spine of The Wind in the Willows—the same volume I read in bed when I was a child. It has been my friend for more than 40 years, there for me, a kind light. Here is the volume of Raymond Carver I threw across the room when I was a student because it was so amazing, so tender with broken people. Here is Alasdair Gray and his mind-blowing Lanark, which taught me the courage inherent in thinking and creating when I had no courage of my own. Here is my library.”