The Daily Beast - Martin Goldsmith's outstanding 1939 novel, Detour, which because the basis for the classic 1945 film noir

The Washington Post - Our depressing trend of talking and writing in the exact same dozen phrases and what it says about us

The Daily Beast - A little F. Scott Fitzgerald for May Day

The Daily Beast - Horror master M.R. James saved his scariest tale for Easter

The Daily Beast - Victor Hugo, architecture, the architecture of prose

The Washington Post - What the suicide of John Kennedy Toole says about publishing fifty years later

The Daily Beast - J.P. Donleavy's Fairy Tale of New York and the perfect St. Patrick's Day mix

The Daily Beast - How Stendhal captured love

The Daily Beast - The brilliant. brief diary of ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky

The Washington Post - John Keats and the perfect poem for Valentine's Day

The Daily Beast - The sexton who was Ebenezer Scrooge before Scrooge was Scrooge

The Daily Beast - A merry little Christmas tale of friendship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson

The Washington Post - The joys of rereading Little Women at Christmastime

The Daily Beast - The thrilling race to discover DNA

The Daily Beast - The history-distorting Thanksgiving poem of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The American Interest - The scariest radio program in American history

The Daily Beast - The bewitching, liminal subgenre where horror meets comedy

The Daily Beast - A rereading of "Casey at the Bat"

The Daily Beast - Why YA fiction is often infinitely better than so-called literary fiction

The Smart Set - Sailing the seas within

The Daily Beast - A baseball diary for the sports lit canon

The Barnes and Noble Review - The making of 2001: A Space Odyssey

The American Interest - Imagination policing in publishing and the real reasons people do not read

The Daily Beast - William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as the ultimate Easter novel

The Daily Beast - Miles Davis and the best autobiography by a musician

Glimmer Train - Writing in your head as you walk

The Daily Beast - How Dylan Thomas invented the audio book at Christmas

The Daily Beast - Overlooked short fiction for Halloween

Salon - The resonance of M.R. James's creepiest ghost story in the current age of self-deception

The Daily Beast - William Sloane and the perfect horror novel for fall

The Daily Beast - Could F. Scott Fitzgerald rescue modern fiction?

The San Francisco Chronicle - A biography of Thoreau

The San Francisco Chronicle - Karl Ove Knausgaard is comically bad at writing

The Philadelphia Inquirer - Robbie Robertson's autobiography

TLS - Delectable mysteries for Christmas

Sports Illustrated - Wayne Gretzky, scribe

The Philadelphia Inquirer - The overrated Seinfeld

Vice - Cynthia Asquith, the first lady of horror

The San Francisco Chronicle - A boring Chuck Klosterman book that publishing wants you to pretend to care about

The San Francisco Chronicle - A largely pointless David Duchovny novel

The Washington Post - 1971, the year rock allegedly exploded (it didn't)

The LA Review of Books - The perfect noir novel, Build My Gallows High

The Smart Set - The charming subgenre of midshipman literature

The Weekly Standard - The hilarity of Booth Tarkington's Seventeen and Penrod novels

The Barnes and Noble Review - Five baseball books to check out

The San Francisco Chronicle - Physics lessons

The Philadelphia Inquirer - The Mysteries of Paris, a fat, fascinating, ripping yarn from 1842 that reads excellently in 2016

The American Interest - F. Scott Fitzgerald often wrote better works than The Great Gatsby

The Smart Set - John Keats and a very special Christmas letter

The Weekly Standard - When it comes to ghost stories, M.R. James is great, but hear hear for E.F. Benson!

The Philadelphia Inquirer - Tom Brady v. Peyton Manning (come on now!)

The San Francisco Chronicle - Dave Thomson's largely middling advice about how to watch a film

The Barnes and Noble Review - The Football Lit canon

The San Francisco Chronicle - Shirley Jackson's odds and sods

The Philadelphia Inquirer - The secret history of Alice in Wonderland

The Smart Set - The early twentieth century husband and wife ghost story writing team of Alice and Claude Askew

The San Francisco Chronicle - Three new baseball books

The San Francisco Chronicle - Orson Welles's last movie

The Barnes and Noble Review - Orson Welles and the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast

The Spectator - A lost John Ehle classic to rival anything by Faulkner

The Barnes and Noble Review - Schubert's Winter Journey

The Washington Post - Contemporary art

The Paris Review Daily - The great English tradition of Christmas ghost stories

The Barnes and Noble Review - How Star Wars went about conquering the universe

The Boston Globe - A biography of Bill Parcells

Popmatters - M.R. James and the tricky business of the imagination

The Boston Globe - H.P. Lovecraft gets annotated

The Boston Globe - Joe Perry dishes on Aerosmith

The San Francisco Chronicle - Top tier football writing

The Boston Globe - Hopping around with Julio Cortazar

The Smart Set - Conan Doyle's final Sherlock Holmes stories

The Boston Globe - A life of Beethoven

The Weekly Standard - The real Mozart

The Barnes and Noble Review - Collecting the blues

The Boston Globe - A miracle over at Fenway

The Barnes and Noble Review - Clark Ashton Smith's eldritch fictions

The Boston Globe - A voluminous Michael Jordan biography

The Boston Globe - The Red Sox and the best comeback--huzzah!--in sports history