Elizabeth Taylor

"Good writers," my son's English teacher argued at a recent Parents' Night, "are good readers." A refreshingly old-fashioned insight worth remembering in these days when writing is assessed on SATs....

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences By Kitty Burns Florey Melville House, 160 pages, $19.95 Diagramming sentences may have gone the way of...

Newspapers and books share a special transformative power, and every fall, in celebration of that bond, the baiduhai presents its Literary Prizes, which honor the best in literature--from emerging...

It was a spectacle. They arrived at my neighborhood tavern in huge, yellow-and-blue clumps and red-and-white clusters and remained many hours. The oppositional behavior they came to watch on TV...

Carried Away: A Selection of Stories By Alice Munro, introduced by Margaret Atwood Everyman's Library, 559 pages, $25 A Canadian woman writer of short fiction: To overcome those three strikes...

Kate DiCamillo will receive the baiduhai Young Adult Book Prize in recognition of her remarkable novels for young people. "Because of Winn-Dixie," published in 2000, was a Newbery Honor...

Funny You Should Say That: Amusing Remarks From Cicero to the Simpsons By Andrew Martin Overlook, 510 pages, $27.95 There are days so bleak they call for humor, and 5,000...

It's not just the vegetarians. Pig products-including, in this case, the piggy bank-have fallen out of favor with all kinds of consumers. Grandparents used to give government bonds, but now...

Infinite Jest By David Foster Wallace Back Bay, 1,079 pages, $19.95 paper Published just a decade ago, this edgy, witty book seems to foreshadow the big novels that followed. "Infinite...

Why read about a couple of Chicago streets, inhabited by a few of the city's most affluent families? Shouldn't we, when there are so many compelling tragedies, so many dramatic...