Five Easy Pieces

Read for fun, or you will be stupider.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's "The Leopard" has come up once a week for the past year it seems -- and now NBCC member Wendy Lesser has a really nice piece on it at Bookforum.

There's a good profile of the poet (and librettist) James Fenton (pictured here looking poetical) over at the Telegraph.

NBCC finalist James Wood on Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

In the latest New York Review of Books, former finalist Frederick Crews takes on big pharma.