In George Saunders' new collection of short stories, In Persuasion Nation, babies wear a device to simulate witty banter. Teenagers can be hardwired to receive ads through a socket in the backs of their necks. Kurt Andersen talks with the writer about why he ...

The novelist A.M. Holmes knows how to transform tranquility into catastrophe. Yet her latest book, This Book Will Save Your Life, manages to reach a happy ending -- much to the chagrin of some critics. Kurt Andersen talks with Homes about the surreal lives ...

Christianity as we know it is coming to an end: Sony Pictures' adaptation of Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code is being released this week. With the help of novelist Anne Rice, Kurt Andersen tries to decode the controversy.

Kurt Andersen wonders why everyone is "shocked, shocked!" that Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan allegedly plagiarized her debut novel. The real scandal was the fact that a college student was going to be launched as a pre-fabricated literary superstar.

Comic book artist Dan Clowes and filmmaker Terry Zwigoff have brought their endearing misanthropy twice to the big screen-first in 2001 with Ghost World and now with the new film Art School Confidential. Zwigoff and Clowes curb their enthusiasm with Kurt ...

In the near future America will have gone completely Christian, Hollywood will be renamed Holywood and Jesus will hail from The Bronx. That is, if all goes according to Tony Hendra's new novel, The Messiah Of Morris Avenue. Hendra talks with Kurt Andersen about ...

We asked humorist Jack Handey—the creator of Saturday Night Live's "Deep Thoughts"—why people are so driven to violence. He thinks it's because we're human.

Kurt Andersen and Chuck Palahniuk explore the appeal of violence in entertainment.

The hero of Colson Whitehead's new novel Apex Hides the Hurt is an advertising executive with a natural gift for branding new products. Kurt Andersen asked Whitehead why he gave his character the strange gig of renaming a small town with a troubled history.

Walter Mosley is best known for his Easy Rawlins detective novels, which incorporate an African-American perspective and an historic sense of race relations into the classic hard-boiled genre. Mosley talks with Kurt Andersen about his remarkable career and his new novel Fortunate Son, which ...

Kurt Andersen surveys the strange history of vampires in pop culture.

Kurt Andersen talks with law professor Kenji Yoshino, author of Covering: The Hidden Assault On Our Civil Rights, about how we all distort our identities at some point in our lives—even if it's just concealing a tattoo or pretending to like sports.

Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz is most famous for his novels about modern Cairo, including Palace Walk, but his latest book isn't exactly fiction. When he was 83 years old, Mahfouz survived a stabbing by Islamic extremists. During his long convalescence, he published accounts of his dreams in ...

Dreams have always provided rich material for artists, and interpreting dreams can be as fun as interpreting art. This week in Studio 360, Kurt Andersen and the novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni look at artists who use their sleeping hours to gather raw material.

We're all too familiar with junk mail that offers to enlarge body parts or reduce mortgages. Most of us delete these messages right away. Mallory Kasdan finds unexpected art in her pile of unsolicited emails.

Spring can seem all too fleeting. Bruce Stutz wanted to soak in the season in all its glory. He headed south to where springtime was first hitting the US and chronicled the blossoming, from butterfly migrations to small-town Mardi Gras. Stutz discusses his new book Chasing Spring ...

The main character in Roger Rosenblatt's new novel lives in the Hamptons -- the summer playground for New York's insultingly rich. There is no shortage of annoyances to fuel Harry March's rants, but his anger overloads when his neighbor Lapham air conditions the lawn of his super-sized ...

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit that asked, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?" Sound artist Jane Philbrick asked a question just as unlikely: "What if retired Senator Jesse Helms could recite a lesbian love poem by Gertrude Stein?" Andrew Adam Newman found out how Philbrick's quixotic project ...

Much of the hand-wringing about violence these days has to do with TV, movies, and video games. But Chuck Palahniuk tells Kurt that books can sometimes be the best medium for vicarious head bashing. Palahniuk reads a bit from his new book Haunted. And he breaks the ...

LeRoy's novels drew heavily on his own grim past as a drug abuser and teenage truckstop prostitute. He achieved critical success and rare literary stardom -- until it turned out he didn't exist. Kurt trades tales with Simon Dumenco, a magazine editor who knew "him" (in person, ...