Percival Everett, whose nineteenth novel, Assumption, will be published by Graywolf Press in November, discusses the role of art in society.

Seth Fried, whose story collection The Great Frustration was published by Soft Skull Press in May, finds a simple way of getting good placement of his debut book in the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York City.

In September Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish South African author Jacques Strauss's debut novel, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V., about eleven-year-old Jack Viljee, whose hometown of Johannesburg in 1989 is still ruled by apartheid.

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. 

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.