Six months ago, I found myself drowning in a flood of easy information. The internet—and all the lovely things on it, things like Wikipedia, Twitter, podcasts, the New Yorker, email, TED Talks, Facebook, Youtube, Buzzfeed occasionally, and yes, even the Harvard Business Review—provide unlimited sources of delight at the touch of a finger.

 Time is a strange kind of puzzle, isn’t it? At least that’s how it has been for me with respect to my writing life.

Decades ago, when I made a personal commitment to pursue writing as a career, I knew I would have to learn how to set aside time to write. Otherwise, my commitment would be useless. I wouldn’t have a

Tom Clancy, the best-selling author of dozens of thrillers, including a famed series starring Jack Ryan, died Tuesday in Baltimore, his publisher, Putnam, has confirmed. He was 66.

Born in Baltimore, Clancy was an insurance salesman before he went on to write blockbuster espionage books, including The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.

Writer Ann Morgan set herself a challenge – to read a book from every country in the world in one year. She describes the experience and what she learned.

I used to think of myself as a fairly cosmopolitan sort of person, but my bookshelves told a different story. Apart from a few Indian novels and the odd Australian and South African book, my literature collection consisted of British and American titles. Worse still, I hardly ever tackled anything in translation. My reading was confined to stories by English-speaking authors.

 JK Rowling, the British author of the best-selling Harry Potter books, was forced to reveal on Sunday that she had published a critically acclaimed crime novel under a pseudonym.
The mother of three was unveiled by the Sunday Times newspaper as the writer of “The Cuckoo’s Calling”, a debut novel about a private detective who investigates a model’s suicide. It is purportedly by Robert Galbraith, described by the publisher as a former member of the Royal Military Police who has since 2003 been working in the civilian security industry.

The newspaper looked into Galbraith after suspicions were raised at how a first-time author with a background in the military could write such an assured debut novel. After being outed, Rowling, 47,

How self-pubbed best-seller Hugh Howey overturned the author-reader relationship—and wrote the next great sci-fi saga.

When bookstore employee and indie author Hugh Howey published his short story “Wool” as a 99-cent e-book on Amazon in July of 2011, he wasn’t banking on the story transforming his career. He didn’t even post a link to the story on his own website. But “Wool,” about a post-apocalyptic future in which society has been forced to live underground in a vast silo, quickly became the most popular thing he had ever written. By the end of October, the story had made it on the Kindle sci-fi best-seller list. Howey started to get emails from readers asking him for the rest of the story. There was no rest of the story, so Howey decided to write it.

A former Navy SEAL's insider account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden contains classified information, the Pentagon said Tuesday, and the admiral who heads the Naval Special Warfare Command said details in the book may provide enemies with dangerous insight into secretive U.S. operations.

Rear Adm. Sean Pybus told his force Tuesday that "hawking details about a mission" and selling other information about SEAL training and operations puts the force and their families at risk.

Each year, Forbes estimates the earnings of writers based on conversations with authors, publishers, and others, as well as reference materials like the Nielsen BookScan numbers. On the 2012 list of top-earning scribes you'll see some familiar names but there's at least one big headline: Female authors are making in-roads on a list that some years has seemed to be an old-boys club. Check out the 15 writers who made the cut in 2012.

We all have our stories; intimate stories about our lives that we long to share. Stories about those things that have dearly touched us and stories about things that have cruelly torn us apart; stories about honor, stories about despair.

Our stories are about what happens to us, within us, around us. Our daily joy, grief, the silly times, the lonely times. Some of our stories are about that simple moment in our lives that change us forever. And some are about the significant moments that we wish we could do over.

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile.

Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry, the famed author of “Lonesome Dove” and dozens of other books, was walking slowly along State Highway 79 on Friday morning toward this town’s only major intersection. Down the block, more than 150 collectors and dealers were queuing up to bid on 300,000 used books — about two-thirds of the stock of Booked Up, the four-building literary mecca that Mr. McMurtry started here in 1988.

Often times when movies are based on popular books, what’s on screen doesn’t live up to what first appeared on the pages. Stories are altered to fit into the allotted time and the vision the reader had in mind doesn’t always mesh with the producers’ interpretation of the book.

But what if a book served as a companion to the movie, instead of an alternate version? That is what you get with “The Dark Knight Rises,” Greg Cox’s novelization of the Warner Bros. Pictures film directed by Christopher Nolan.

While the third movie in the most recent Batman trilogy is based on a classic comic-book character, so many adaptations have been made that no one is really calling out Nolan for not getting every detail right. That’s

Gore Vidal, the novelist, essayist and playwright, will be remembered as much for his outspokenness and scorn for popular culture and politics as for his 60-year writing career.

He died Tuesday at age 86.

His nephew, Burr Steers, said Vidal died at his home in the Hollywood Hills of complications from pneumonia. Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for "quite a while," Steers said.

Vidal, whose best sellers included Myra Breckenridge and Burr, was proud to be a political and literary troublemaker.

Jonah Lehrer resigned from the New Yorker Monday after Tablet Magazine revealed that he fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in his book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works."

The seemingly prodigious young writer drew criticism last month when he admittedly recycled his own writing in blog posts for the New Yorker, including lines taken almost verbatim from previously published Wall Street Journal essays.

Now, Michael C. Moynihan, a writer for the Jewish magazine Tablet, revealed that Lehrer concocted Bob Dylan quotes and later lied to Moynihan because he "panicked."

The art of writing can be reduced to a few simple rules. I share them with you now.

Rule No. 1: Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that

On a steamy morning last week Mark Dimunation, the chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, was in a windowless basement room here at the University of Virginia, leading a dozen people in a bibliophile’s version of the wave.

He lined up the group and handed each person a sheet of copier paper with a syllable written on it. After a few halting practice

Author Stephen Covey, whose "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" sold more than 20 million copies, died Monday at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, a hospital spokeswoman said. He was 79.

Covey's family issued a statement, reported by CNN affiliate KSL, saying he died from residual effects of an April bicycle accident.

Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III will tell the "one tale still untold" from the Sandman Library.

When it comes to modern comic books, the conversation will inevitably turn to Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, which stands alongside Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns in terms of literary and critical acclaim. Largely considered to be Vertigo Comics' first flagship title, the series introduced readers to Morpheus, the living personification of dreams, as he interacted with ordinary humans, faeries, angels,

In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whisper:

First Self: Here, in this madman, I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night. I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel.

Second Self: Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given to me to be this madman's joyous self. I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts. It is I that would rebel against my weary existence.

BECAUSE I am a middle school reading enrichment teacher, parents and colleagues often ask my advice about summer assignments. My automatic reply echoes a hit song from the ’70s, “any love is good lovin’.” I tell them blithely that any reading is good reading, while I think to myself, we’ll take whatever we can get.