The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood by Irving Finkel – review

Irving Finkel with a 4,000-year-old clay tablet documenting the story of the flood. Photograph: Sang Tan/AP

The fact that a member of Ukip blamed the introduction of gay marriage for the recent floods in England reminds us that there is an enduring human tendency to read acts of nature theologically rather than meteorologically. It happened after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, when local clerics blamed that tragic inundation on the excesses of the tourist trade. The mother of all moralising flood stories is the tale of Noah's ark and the animals that went into it two by two to save themselves from God's decision to drown the whole human race and start again. As a myth it has charm as well as moral clout, so why meddle with it? Well, fear not: Irving Finkel's beguiling book will only increase your interest in the story – unless, of course, you belong to the Ukip school of biblical interpretation.

With great wit and warmth, Finkel, who is endearingly described as "assistant keeper" of the Middle East at the British Museum, shows how the Hebrew exiles led into captivity in Babylon in the 6th century BC came across a tradition of Mesopotamian flood stories based on real events and adapted them to their own transcendental purposes.

Although the lovely Greek word Mesopotamia was lost in the first world war and replaced with Iraq, its meaning, "between the rivers" (Tigris and Euphrates), is the clue here. This is flood country, so it's hardly surprising that instructions for making boats abounded, and most of them seem to have ended up in the British Museum. Finkel is a master at deciphering these ancient cuneiform clay tablets, but this book is far more than a fine piece of detective work: it is a humane work of scholarship that enlarges the soul.

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1913: The World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson – review

Kaiser Willhelm II with Winston Churchill at Lowther Castle, north-west England, 1906: were the signs of the conflict to come self-evident? Photograph: Corbis

Did you read the writing on the wall in 2012? Could you tell that a third world war would start in 2013 when Russia and Iran responded to the American attack on Syria? If a lack of restraint had pitched us into global conflict last year, historians would have woven narratives to show the signs we missed (I was preparing my own version).

The inevitability of the first world war is usually traced in a similar way, back through events of 1913 and before, and several excellent books have looked at how the world went to war, notably Christopher Clark's excellent The Sleepwalkers. Emmerson's 1913 tries hard to ignore what follows and mostly it succeeds.

This is not an attempt to explain how the war started but more to show what was lost, what it felt like to be alive in that unlucky-number year. If you were European, particularly British, it felt very good indeed. The British empire was not what it was, damaged as much close to home by suffragettes and Irish nationalists as it was threatened by the growing challenges from the US, China and restless colonies. Emmerson presents this world through portraits of its great cities, which seems appropriate as many of them were linked up in a way we would recognise as global: the modernity of some aspects of city life a century ago is striking, with the startup of global brands such as Gucci and Ford, although there were still sheep cropping Hyde Park.

Many of the choices of cities are obvious, divided into groups such as Europe's imperial capitals, some key American cities, a scattering of others – Algiers, Bombay, Tehran – and a handful of cities belonging to "twilight powers", although in the absence of a compelling argument, some choices can seem random. To capture a year of the world in a single snapshot is, of course, impossible, but Emmerson provides a real sense of 1913 by combining details of individual lives with sweeping international trends: one of the great pleasures of this book is to see parallels between then and now.

Yet he clings to the view that the world in 1913 was one of innocence, security and mutual understanding, epitomised, perhaps, by the ball in Berlin in May 1913, attended by the British king-emperor, the German kaiser and the Russian tsar. Not unlike the after party of the G20 summit in St Petersburg last year, and therefore hardly a reliable measure of international relations.

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Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha – review

The young Gandhi: the bulk of his philosophy was shaped by his experiences as a lawyer in South Africa. Photograph: Mondadori/ Getty Images

For a man born into the obscurity of a remote village in western India in 1869, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who died at the hand of an assassin in 1948, still enjoys a remarkable and vigorous posthumous reputation. He has inspired Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and even the Dalai Lama. His techniques of nonviolent resistance have been widely copied across the world. During the Arab spring, the radical opposition in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia often displayed Gandhi's photograph during their protests, as a symbol of their methods and aspirations. His famous contemporaries – notably Mao Zedong, Roosevelt and Churchill – enjoy nothing like the same afterlife.

As with many great revolutionaries, Gandhi expressed his ideas in print throughout his career. Between 1903 and 1948, he published his opinions in a weekly newspaper, in Gujarati and English. Accordingly, his Collected Works, published by the Indian government in a series of about a hundred volumes, an accumulation of speeches, essays, editorials and interviews, provide an extraordinarily intimate picture of the man – but from an Indian point of view.

In Gandhi Before India, Ramachandra Guha, one of the subcontinent's most influential historians, has set himself the revisionist task of challenging this Indo-centric self-portrait of the Mahatma, not merely cleaning the family portrait, but uncovering a new backdrop and giving the whole restoration a new frame. Guha's impressive monograph, the first of two volumes, challenges the Gandhi legend as it was portrayed in, for instance, Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning film starring Ben Kingsley.

As well as the childhood in Gujarat and his two years as a student in London, Guha focuses on the now almost forgotten chapter in Gandhi's career, his two decades as a lawyer and community organiser in imperial South Africa before and after the Boer war. Guha is at pains to demonstrate that, up to his final return, aged 46, Gandhi had almost no knowledge of India in the wider sense. When he first went to London, at 19, MK Gandhi had never travelled outside his native Kathiawar. Later, in 1892 and 1902, he spent months in Bombay but, despite visits to Calcutta and Madras in 1896, had never actually "spoken to a single Indian peasant worker living or working in India itself". Rather, Gandhi's ideas, beliefs and deepest political instincts had been shaped by his remarkable career as a crusading lawyer in South Africa.

When Guha lists Gandhi's four major callings – freedom fighter, social reformer, religious pluralist and prophet – he clearly identifies each of these as having their roots in Natal and the Transvaal. Gandhi's most famous contribution to the 20th century, satyagraha (or "truth force"), the technique of mass civil disobedience, was also invented in South Africa. Gandhi's non-Indian side becomes even more distinct when Guha describes the minutiae of his African life and work. The big surprise is the degree to which the future Mahatma was so completely in tune with the wider ethos of the British empire, emerging, somewhat bizarrely, as an empire loyalist.

Indeed, when the Boer war broke out, Gandhi expressed hope for "a British victory". He had, meanwhile, become "the champion of the Indian cause in Natal", although this, as Guha shows, was less to do with his sympathy for the rights of his fellow Indians than the failure of his legal career during a return to Bombay in 1902.

When the call came to return to South Africa, Gandhi saw it as a way out of a professional impasse. Identifying his luck, he moved fast. Soon after his return to the Transvaal, he set up the newspaper, Indian Opinion, that would become the bridgehead for the battle on behalf of his people.

At this moment in the early 1900s, the many competing strands in Gandhi's life were almost wholly focused on South Africa. He was a lawyer working for clients in Johannesburg and Durban, and also campaigning for the rights of Indians in the Transvaal. He was a newspaper propagandist. Finally, he was becoming obsessed with the simple life, by solitude, diet, meditation and celibacy. In 1906, he took the vow of brahmacharya, curtailing all sexual relations with his long-suffering wife. If Guha's work has a weakness it is that, in focusing so intently on its new portrait, it neglects the human toll inflicted on those around the incipient Mahatma.

1906 marked the turning point. Gandhi returned to London briefly, and began to realise – not least through his meeting with the young Winston Churchill – that he and his fellows were irredeemably "alien". Much later, he was asked what he thought of modern civilisation. "I think it would be a good idea," came the reply. No accident, then, that soon after his return home, passive resistance landed him in prison.

As the lawyer morphed into the campaigning ascetic, he decided that "we would all profit from the kind of simplicity and solitude we find in gaol". While the future Gandhi begins to emerge, his contemporaries were already recognising his genius. Guha takes scholarly pride in tracking down the 1909 letter which first describes Gandhi as "a Mahatma" (a great and holy soul), the title bestowed on him by Rabindranath Tagore in 1919.

But this is to run ahead. Guha still wants to nail an Anglocentric Gandhi before his final return to India and now does so with the intriguing revelation that it was none other than GK Chesterton who helped inspire the text, Hind Swaraj (or Indian Home Rule) with which Gandhi would make the transition to his role as the father of Indian independence.

It's a truism of this genre that the closer the biographer comes to his subject, the more elusive they become. In the end, with or without South Africa, Gandhi was a remarkable man, for some a secular saint, with an extraordinary capacity to transcend issues of race, class, religion and even politics. Exactly what this amazing man was really like is rather missing from this volume. No doubt Professor Guha will put that straight in the second half of this ground-breaking study.

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Prequel lays out life before 'The Godfather'

BLACKSBURG, Va. – The Falcos seem like such a nice family. Ed is a respected literary novelist, writer of short stories and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Tech. His niece, Edie Falco, is the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actress.

By Joe Brier, for USA TODAY

Connected guy: Ed Falco's prequel to Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather,' 'The Family Corleone,' arrives Tuesday.

By Joe Brier, for USA TODAY

Connected guy: Ed Falco's prequel to Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather,' 'The Family Corleone,' arrives Tuesday.

So what are they doing hanging out with the Mafia?

"It's a joke between us, a constant source of amusement," says the elder Falco, whose new book, The Family Corleone, a prequel to Mario Puzo's wildly popular 1969 novel The Godfather, goes on sale Tuesday. "We're not sure how we both ended up in the Mob. We like to think it's coincidental."

Edie Falco, of course, is famous for her award-winning role as Carmela in The Sopranos, the hit HBO series revolving around a Mafia family.

Not that the two are complaining. The Mob connection seems to work quite nicely for the Family Falco.

"Yeah, it was funny that an actress from a suburban Italian-American family ended up being associated with a Mob family of some renown, years ago though it was," Edie Falco, who now plays a drug-addicted nurse in Showtime's Nurse Jackie, says by e-mail. "Then my uncle goes and writes this book about another Mob family of some great renown! Just when I thought I was out."

But the Falcos are not out. Ed Falco got in on the Mob action because his literary agent, Neil Olson of Donadio and Olson, represented Puzo and now the Puzo family. "He thought I'd be a good person to work with Mario Puzo's themes," Falco says. "And I was interested in getting into popular fiction."

The Family Corleone is based on unproduced portions of the screenplays of Godfather 3 and 4, both written by Puzo, who died in 1999. The prequel follows two sequels to The Godfather, both written by Mark Winegardner, who did not get the prequel nod — the best-selling The Godfather Returns (2004) and the less successful The Godfather's Revenge (2006).

In Falco's prequel, Mob boss Vito Corleone is most interested in the future of his family. His youngest children — Michael, Fredo and Connie — are in school and clueless about Daddy's "profession." Adopted son Tom is away at college. It's Sonny, his 17-year-old and most unruly son, who worries him most. Much of the book revolves around Sonny's desire to get into the "business."

Booklist, which reviews thousands of new books, already has given The Family Corleone its blessing, saying it "channels the original so well that readers will be vividly reminded of Puzo's strength," leaving them "dreaming of just one more movie."

Falco is well-known in academic circles for his award-winning short-story collections, three novels, nine plays and his poetry (written as Edward Falco). But it wasn't all that much a stretch for him to venture into Mob territory as "Ed" Falco. The themes of gangsters and betrayal have appeared in Falco's work before, in his novels Wolf Point and Saint John of the Five Boroughs among them.

"Gangsters have always interested me. Outlaws," he says.

But talking in his neat, book-lined office on the Virginia Tech campus, Falco says he is no mobster. He has no criminal record and only hints at once having had a gambling habit. Ponies. Poker. "But I was never particularly good at it," he says with a laugh. "That's why I'm a writer."

Having published through small academic presses with small press runs for much of his 25-year career at Virginia Tech, Falco was eager for a larger stage. The Family Corleone has a first print run of 130,000 copies.

"I jumped at the chance. I wanted to write something that had an audience. The literary world can be very small."

Falco, who writes in the morning now that he's 63 and goes to bed much earlier than he used to, says the book came to him quite quickly. "I wrote it in about eight months. It's usually a much slower process. Two years or so."

He calls writing both a "puzzle and a challenge" and confesses that dealing with Puzo's long shadow was intimidating.

"But I went into it with a certain bravado," says Falco, who is as soft-spoken as the original godfather, Marlon Brando, star of the classic 1972 blockbuster movie now celebrating its 40th anniversary as a pop culture icon. "I knew the milieu."

It comes through. The Family Corleone is filled with the smell of simmering tomato sauce, cheap cigarettes and the taste of ripe figs, picked from a tree in a Brooklyn backyard.

What intrigued him most was working with "monsters who lived under the mask of civility. I liked peeling away the outer layers."

He was also interested in the time— the Depression-era '30s in New York, a city inhabited by Italian and Irish immigrants who were battling for turf.

Falco's editor at Grand Central, Mitch Hoffman, said Falco rose to the challenge.

"Ed had to take the kernel of a story — a story involving truly beloved characters that everyone knows — and he had to honor the legacy of Mario Puzo," Hoffman says. "All the while expanding that into a contemporary story that feels fresh and new and his. And he pulled it off."

Falco is well aware that the legions of Godfather fans will have the final say.

"I like the book. Other people will have to decide," he says, realizing all too well that some Puzo fans have a "certain position" on The Godfather brand. "They don't want people fooling with it."

That would be Rachel Clements Case of Lynchburg, Va., a big fan of Puzo's original.

"I'm not a fan of prequels or sequels written by someone other than the original author," says Case, a stay-at-home mother of four. "I won't be reading. When something is as great as The Godfather, you should just leave it alone."

But Alan Simmons, a copywriter from Bella Vista, Ark., is willing to take a look. "I'm a huge fan of The Godfather and I'm fascinated by Italian-American culture, so I would definitely read it. I'm normally not a fan of prequels, but for this I would make an exception."

Falco does come to the job with certain advantages. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father was a house painter. His mother a seamstress. But the only time his parents spoke Italian was in anger. (Falco is divorced and in a relationship. He has a daughter and stepson.)

"Every word in there I grew up with," Falco says with a laugh. "My parents didn't speak Italian around us kids, but they cursed in Italian, so I knew all the exclamations."

He just didn't know how to spell them. Like v'a Napoli! which translates to "Go to Naples!" which turns into "Go to hell!"

Not that the project hasn't come with larger controversies.

In February, Paramount filed a lawsuit accusing Puzo's heirs of approving sequels to The Godfather without the studio's permission and in violation of previous agreements. Puzo's heirs came back with a $10 million countersuit in March over the studio's attempts to block The Family Corleone.

The Puzo family says it has informed Paramount several times of the publication of Falco's book and noted the studio did not object to the 2006 sequel.

In a statement, Paramount said: "The studio has tremendous respect and admiration for Mario Puzo, whose novel The Godfather was acquired in 1969 and helped spawn one of the most celebrated film trilogies of all time. We have an obligation to and will protect our copyright and trademark interests."

Grand Central, publisher of The Family Corleone, has distanced itself from the lawsuits, which are still pending, and is proceeding with publication.

Hoffman, Falco's editor, says he's "happy to be publishing this great book" despite the legal hassles. "I hope they all revolve their differences."

If there's a film to be made out of the newest Godfather book, Falco isn't saying. (Paramount also would not comment on possible film rights.)

"The book is out. Film rights are another deal," Falco says, refusing to even play the who-would-play-who game in a film version of his book. (Francis Ford Coppola made three Godfather movies; the first two were classics, the third, not so much.)

Falco did concede, however, that he wrote the book with various scenes in mind. "Yes, I tried to do some scene writing, because I loved the (first) movie. I hope it translates visually. That was part of my job."

Part of his job was also to bring his characters to life, like young and reckless Sonny (James Caan in the films). "He's an Italian guy you easily recognize. Like one of my uncles. Not terribly smart but full of opinions! A sweet guy who might smack you up side the head at any moment."

Wasn't he worried about reinforcing stereotypes? "I tried to make them individuals."

As for the 21 graduate students who are in his MFA program, he doesn't quite know what they think about all this — a Mafia novel from their most academic of professors.

"I'm known as a literary writer of short stories," he acknowledges. "But evolution is natural."

Or maybe it was an offer Falco couldn't refuse.

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WALKING TO HOLLYWOOD: Memories of Before the Fall

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Jun 22, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Will Self
Grove
ISBN 978-0802119728
432 pages
$24

Reviewed by Adam Langer, who is working on a sequel to his most recent novel, "The Thieves of Manhattan"

Halfway through "Walking to Hollywood," Will Self's trippy triptych of quasi-autobiographical narratives detailing his obsessions and neuroses, is a novel-length story, also called "Walking to Hollywood," in which the author travels to L.A. to see what happened to the movies.

"I want to find out who killed film," Self writes. "For film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age. I don't know if film was murdered -- but I suspect there's a killer out there."

Perhaps the more pressing question at the heart of this book turns out to be not whether anyone murdered the movies, but whether the movies and Western pop culture are murdering literature. For, while reading Self, we find ourselves in the company of an uncommonly gifted wordsmith. The man can write with the savage wit of Martin Amis, the erudition of Christopher Hitchens, the incisive self-analysis of Spalding Gray, and with an enviable vocabulary that, at its best, can make you think of James Joyce. Self is an expert in spoofing both high and low culture; he drops knowing, funny references to Mike Myers' "The Love Guru," comic songwriting duo Flanders and Swann and Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson. He's also an inspired coiner of neologisms and a splendid creator of metaphors. A jet trundles along a runway "with all the grace of a stolen shopping trolley"; two hands "Sistine" together; a dead ringer for French author Michel Houellebecq is a "Houellebecqalike"; souped-up elevator music is "Rachmaninschmaltz."

And yet the author utilizes all this talent and skill in the service of conceits so flimsy that they can be overwhelmed by his Self-consciousness and his Tourette's-like tic for inserting pop-culture references everywhere. These are so numerous and often so distracting that they can make the reader forget that Self is telling any particular story at all.

"What did narrative have going for it anyway?" Self asks himself at one point. Well, judging from what's missing from large portions of this book, quite a lot actually.

"Walking to Hollywood" starts out promisingly enough with "Very Little," a novella that concerns the author's long-standing friendship and rivalry with Sherman Oaks, a 39-inch-tall artist who has achieved international stardom with his work, in which he recreates his own body on an increasingly gigantic scale, even attempting to make a 26-mile-long outline of himself in the Great Salt Lake Desert. Much of this material is entertaining and engaging because Sherman Oaks is a memorably idiosyncratic character. Although the story may be diminutive, it is also compact enough to effectively accommodate the narrator's ruminations about, say, his own obsessive-compulsive disorder and his occasional, amusing digressions, which include the lurid, Self-abusive fantasies he harbors regarding the "dreadful things" he might do with the LongPen, an invention that Margaret Atwood helped to create for signing autographs at a great distance.

But then comes the novel within the novel, "Walking to Hollywood," a metaphysical detective story that is so completely dwarfed by the author's asides that even its cleverest observations can become maddening. As Self ambles through Hollywood in search of cinema's killer, he loses his grip on reality. Everyone he sees is not only someone in and of himself but also his cinematic representation. So Will Self appears not only as Will Self, but also as Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis, actors who somewhat resemble him and might have conceivably played him in a movie. Self dines with the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, whom he imagines being played by a 40-something Orson Welles, apparently because both men never quite equaled their first successes and became exceedingly self-referential and also rather puffy in their middle years. The computer HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" makes an appearance. So do the "quadrumanous cartoon dog" Scooby-Doo and Griffin Mill from "The Player." As for what Self imagines Judy Garland doing with the Tin Woodman, let's skip it. A little of this goes a very long way, and there are more than 200pages of it. To borrow from a Monty Python routine about Australian table wines, "eight bottles of this and you're really finished."

The effect of all these winking references can be so wearying that one suspects that Self must be trying to annoy us on purpose, to make us experience how our own obsessions with banal minutiae destroy our ability to read or tell an engaging story. I found myself reminded of the director Jean-Luc Godard, who in the film "Week End" forced his viewers to experience the frustration of being stuck in a traffic jam by depicting one on screen for nearly 10 minutes. Perhaps Self is intentionally bludgeoning us with pop-culture riffs to desensitize us to them so that we might eventually kill them off. Perhaps he's urging us to kill the movies and rid ourselves of our largely useless references to, say, Monty Python routines or Godard films, after which we can once again focus on stories that are more personal, truthful, poetic and universal.

That interpretation would go a long way toward explaining why some passages in "Spurn Head," Self's elegiac meditation on the loss of personal and cultural memory that completes his triptych, seem so refreshing and sublime. As Self's narrator experiences the eroding effects of early onset Alzheimer's while traveling along the coastline of East Yorkshire, the knowing references do not entirely disappear, but they seem to fade away. What emerges in their place is the Self that exists apart from all the distractions that bedevil his thoughts and his prose: a phenomenally talented artist, one capable of work far greater than what he describes in his "Afterword" as this "contorted, wayward and melancholic" book.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Wed, Jun 15: Walt Before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928

by Timothy S. Susanin A review by Charles Solomon

When the extraordinary success of Steamboat Willie made Walt Disney an overnight sensation in 1928, he'd already spent nearly a decade working in animation. During those years, he'd had successes and failures, as Timothy S. Susanin recounts in great detail in his new book Walt Before Mickey.

In 1919, while Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks were working as commercial artists in Kansas City, they taught themselves animation. Disney began exploring the medium with the "Newman Laugh-O-Grams," a series of one-minute topical cartoons for local theater owner Frank Newman. He quit his job and started a studio with money borrowed from friends and relatives. Although the studio went broke, Disney completed the live action/animation Alice's Wonderland, then joined his brother Roy in Los Angeles.

Distributor Margaret Winkler offered Disney a contract for a series based on Alice that would continue the premise of a live-action little girl in a cartoon setting. The series proved successful, but Winkler's business was taken over by her more aggressive husband, Charles Mintz. In 1927, he asked Disney to develop a new character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney's real talents as an organizer and story man began to emerge during the making of the "Oswald" series, which garnered good reviews.

But Disney wanted to improve his films. In early 1928, he went to New York City to ask Mintz to raise the price per film; Mintz instead insisted that he take a cut -- or else Disney would lose the character and his studio. Mintz had covertly signed up almost the entire staff so that the studio could go on without Disney. This underhanded deal changed the course of animation history and American popular culture, as it led Disney to create Mickey Mouse.

Susanin is an attorney, and his remarkable thoroughness makes readers wish he were handling a case for them. Unfortunately, he becomes so enamored with details that the result is like reading about Walt through a tea strainer. Does it increase anyone's understanding of Disney's genius to know that in 1922, he rented office space for his fledgling studio from "realtors working for Lawrence Baer, thirty-seven, a Kansas City native and the son of a German immigrant" -- to whom Susanin devotes four lengthy paragraphs?

Walt Disney's life has already been thoroughly documented: More has reportedly been written about him than any other filmmaker except Charlie Chaplin. His work before the creation of Mickey is covered in the more readable, lavishly illustrated Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney by Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman, in addition to five reliable biographies (by Diane Miller and Pete Martin, Bob Thomas, Katherine and Richard Greene, Michael Barrier and Neal Gabler). Minor and often tangential details constitute the only new material in Walt Before Mickey.

Susanin's knowledge of animation history is limited, and this hampers the narrative. He correctly observes that Julius, the black cat in the "Alice" comedies, initially "seemed like a generic response to the popularity of the popular Felix the Cat," but fails to discuss how Felix influenced not only Julius, but Oswald (and Mickey). He notes that Friz Freleng, another Kansas City native who worked briefly for Disney, "eventually became a director at Warner Brothers, and spent over thirty years there," but omits the five Oscars he won.

Walt Before Mickey is a useful resource for serious film scholars, though general readers may find it much too arcane for their interests.

Solomon is the author, most recently, of The Art of 'Toy Story 3' and Tale as Old as Time: The Art and Making of 'Beauty and the Beast.'

This review was originally published by the Los Angeles Times.

More Than Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. To learn about how to join, click here.

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