"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.

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."

The author of The Uncommon Reader (FSG, 2007) reads from "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," one of the two stories in his new collection, Smut, published earlier this year by Faber and Faber and Profile Books in England and forthcoming in the U.S. next month from Picador.

Amy King, the author of six poetry books, including I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011), reads her poem "Lidija Dimkovska Has Made a Bomb of My Eyes" in this clip. Ugly Duckling Presse published a translation of Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Dimkovska, a poet from Skopje, Macedonia, in 2006.