“The FBI kept a file on noted dirty old man Charles Bukowski.”

Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, whose writing inspired the film Escape from Taliban, was killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday.

“What I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.” At The New Yorker, excerpts from Flannery O’Connor’s journals.

Satan, Humbert Humbert, Moby-Dick, and other curiously sympathetic literary villains.