The author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons talks about his third novel, Nightwoods, published by Random House earlier this fall. "I'm a slow writer," he says. "I really focus on the language.... A page is a good day for me."

In this excerpt from a short film directed by Griffin Dunne, Joan Didion reads from the second chapter of her new memoir, Blue Nights. Be sure to read Kevin Nance's moving profile of Didion in the current issue and listen to Kimberly Farr read a passage of the audio book.

Inspired by Herman Melville's masterpiece, Ohio artist Matt Kish crafted an original piece of art for each page of Moby-Dick. The resulting collection was published in October by Tin House Books. Take a closer look at Kish's work in this issue's installment of The Written Image as well as the related slideshow, which features eleven images from Moby-Dick in Pictures.

In Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia, published last month by Harper Perennial, Blake Butler uses scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, John Cage, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King to explore the tension between sleeping and conscious life. This bizarre trailer, directed by Drew Mobley, evokes Butler's own 129-hour bout of insomnia described in the book.

The folks at Random House and its many imprints, including Knopf, Doubleday, Crown, and Vintage Books, have a little fun promoting Colson Whitehead's latest book, Zone One, a literary zombie novel published last week by Doubleday.

The author of The Buddha in the Attic, who was profiled by Renée H. Shea in the September/October 2011 issue, talks about her novel's nomination for this year's National Book Award in fiction. "I feel lucky to even have an audience," she says. "A prize is something I never really thought about. Usually my concerns are very local, like 'Can I make it through this sentence or through this paragraph?'"

The first volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, published last month by Cambridge University Press, collects the correspondence of the Nobel Prize winner, including postcards, telegrams, and drafts of letters, written between 1907 and 1922 and never intended for publication.

"How does reading about love affect how we fall in love today?" Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote his third novel, The Marriage Plot, around that very question, discusses his new book, the influence of Nabokov, and the pressure of following up his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex.

Steve Almond has a little fun with Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and others at Fox News in this trailer for his story collection God Bless America, forthcoming from Lookout Books in October. 

In this excerpt from P.O.P. (Poets on Poetry), an ongoing documentary shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets, poet Carl Phillips, whose eleventh collection, Double Shadow, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011, reads a poem and talks about a song that matches the mood of the poems he’s been writing lately.