Chain gang By Julia Gracen
Fans of John Norman's novels about the planet Gor create virtual and real-life worlds in which women are slaves. (05/18/00)

The gay Nabokov By Lev Grossman
The novelist never could face the secret that cost his brother his life. (05/17/00)

Shanghaied in Tinseltown By Neil Gordon
John Fante was one of America's great writers, encountering equal measures of victory and defeat during a decades-long career. But did Hollywood strangle his talent, or did he do it himself? (05/12/00)

Shop-happy By Joan Smith
Do Americans shop too much? Maybe, but social critics fail to grasp the delights of stuff and the true causes of our nagging malaise. (05/11/00)

The best American whats of the century? By Jacqueline Carey
A new best-of omnibus has some terrific stories. But are they mysteries? (05/05/00)

Not big in Japan By Jennifer Hanawald
Arthur Golden's American bestseller, "Memoirs of a Geisha," gets a thumbs down from the country where it's set. (05/03/00)

Best of Bond By Emily Jenkins
Ian Fleming's 007 is often most memorable when he's most offensive. (05/01/00)

Bondage and rumination By Maria Russo
James Bond expert James Chapman talks about the enduring allure of Agent 007 and the sexual ambiguity of Ian Fleming's creation. (05/01/00)

The sensitive Bond By Emily Jenkins
Even as a preteen girl, I knew that Ian Fleming's James Bond was a vulnerable guy -- and his creator, an equal-opportunity voyeur. (05/01/00)

The flower of cities all By Maria Russo
In Zadie Smith's remarkable debut novel, London is a merry capital of mismatched lovers. (04/28/00)

Girl wonder By Maria Russo
The life so far of multiracial literary sensation Zadie Smith. (04/28/00)

Espionage and exile By George Packer
Bosnian immigrant Aleksandar Hemon brilliantly mingles grand history and personal story in his debut collection. (04/27/00)

It's a theme-park life By Chris Lehmann
In George Saunders' savage, soulful satires, ordinary people face real crises in a disturbingly artificial America. (04/26/00)

Painting the eyes of a god By Gary Kamiya
Michael Ondaatje, author of "The English Patient," returns with a shimmering, suspenseful tale of a skeleton with a dreadful secret. (04/25/00)

Spring Fiction Fever By the editors of Salon Books
Salon celebrates a season of exceptional books with a weeklong series. (04/24/00)

Life and life only By Charles Taylor
At the top of his form, Philip Roth delivers an astounding novel about three issues that make Americans crazy: Race, sex and Monica. (04/24/00)

Matriarchy blues By Polly Shulman
Feminist sf grows up and gets wise in the conclusion of Suzy McKee Charnas' Holdfast Chronicles. (04/21/00)

Beowulf vs. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin By Jim Rasenberger
Who will layeth the smack down? (04/20/00)

Vicious in the ring, vicious on the page By Charles Taylor
In "The Devil and Sonny Liston," ace reporter Nick Tosches pumps dangerous levels of testosterone into his portrait of the fighter Muhammad Ali humiliated. (04/20/00)

Grief for sale By Ted Gup
A heartbreaking letter bought on the Web led me to a Vermont graveyard. (04/19/00)

Marilyn from within By Pam Rosenthal
Joyce Carol Oates dives deep into an icon and comes up with a masterpiece. (04/18/00)

Before "The Thin Man" By Dick Lochte
However legendary their romance, Dashiell Hammett did his best work before he met Lillian Hellman. (04/17/00)

Five poems to make you swoon
For National Poetry Month, selections from new books by Anne Carson, Charles Wright and others. (04/14/00)

Fools for love By Melanie Rehak
In a new book, some great poets admit their humble, schmaltzy, love-struck poetic beginnings. (04/14/00)

Soul of the suburbs By Andrew O'Hehir
From "American Beauty" to the New York Times, those who satirize and celebrate the burbs seldom understand how they got the way they are. (04/13/00)

Minds wide shut By Robert S. Boynton
A new book makes the CIA's Cold War skulduggery look upright compared with the self-deceptions of the intellectuals who were on the agency's payroll. (04/12/00)

"Lightning on the Sun" By Robert Bingham
An excerpt from Robert Bingham's final work. (04/11/00)

Flameout By Samantha Gillison
A friend remembers the short, scary, brilliant life of novelist Robert Bingham. (04/11/00)

Swallowing anything By Ann Hodgman
Do you really need a new cookbook to figure out how to make brownies? Are those salmon steaks really better with a packet of Butter Buds? (04/07/00)

Shark stories By Ray Sawhill
Bios of David Geffen and Michael Eisner: Stroke books for the power-and-glamour-hungry. (04/06/00)

Martin the moribund By Kera Bolonik
Why is the New York Times' publishing columnist so lame? (04/05/00)

Mini-Shakespeares and kitty-cat bookends By Emily Jenkins
What the strange, cutesy world of book kitsch says about our reading lives. (04/03/00)

The digital reader By Laura Miller
In which I borrow an e-book and give up print for two weeks. (03/31/00)

Party animals By Polly Shulman
Our science fiction columnist on Sean Stewart's dark tale of perpetual Carnival. (03/31/00)

Cassandra complex By Brigitte Frase
Sven Birkerts says computers are destroying literature. He couldn't be more wrong. (03/30/00)

Brave new e-books By Craig Offman
We've seen the future of publishing, and the wrong people are freaking out. (03/29/00)

The revolution that wasn't By Steven M. Zeitchik
Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old. (03/28/00)

Blond ambition By Ann Marlowe
A cloying, half-baked book on the blond myth can't hold a candle to Helen Gurley Brown's gutsy new memoir, "I'm Wild Again." (03/24/00)

Getting there By Jacqueline Carey
Are the ends supposed to justify the means? Or is it the other way around? (03/24/00)

Shrink wars By Sally Eckoff
Dr. Joy may have beaten Dr. Laura to the tube, but she can't win on the bestseller lists. (03/23/00)

Pop stardom vs. deathless prose By Anthony S. Brandt
Is Stephen King as important as Toni Morrison? Is Danielle Steel our Dickens? It all depends on how you measure. (03/21/00)

Idea epidemics By Gavin McNett
In "The Tipping Point," Malcolm Gladwell makes a valuable contribution to the literature of contagion. But is it worth its $1 million advance? (03/17/00)

Skull wars By Lawrence Osborne
Native American activists battle scientists for bones that may prove they had white ancestors. (03/16/00)

I was a bad pornographer By Fiona Maazel
What a shock it was to discover I didn't have a clue how to write dirty prose. (03/15/00)

Brotherly love By Dan Savage
Dave Eggers' memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," has charms to break the Savage heart. (03/14/00)

My book for dummies By Katharine Weber
Did I really want a reading group guide telling people how to read my novel? (03/10/00)

Earthly desires By Melanie Rehak
Gorgeous new poems about human entanglements and the fantasy of escape. (03/10/00)

Green market By Tom Gogola
Conservative Peter Huber says capitalism can save the environment, but he's fudging the bottom line. (03/09/00)

The tell-tale cipher By Jeffery Kurz
Could a mysterious cryptograph be a final message from Edgar Allan Poe? (03/08/00)

Does Al Gore have a heart? By Marjorie Williams
A new bio suggests that underneath the stiff, zombielike striver we've come to know is a real guy. (03/07/00)

The one great recipe By Ann Hodgman
If you single out a recipe, will all the other recipes in the book feel unloved? (03/03/00)

Hands off Harry Potter! By Chris Gregory
Have critics of J.K. Rowlings' books even read them? (03/03/00)

The love rabbi By Sarah Blustain
Shmuley Boteach's sex-positive, gentile-friendly Orthodox Judaism sounds too good to be true. It is. (03/02/00)

Everyday genius By Kate Moses
Joanna Scott's visionary new novel tells the story of an orphan torn between black and white grandparents. (03/02/00)

The empty man By Chris Lehmann
Is lots and lots of money all there is to George W. Bush? Molly Ivins says yes, Elizabeth Mitchell says no. (03/01/00)

Bridget Jones at 80 By Lucinda Rosenfeld
Calorie counting and man chasing in the golden years. (02/29/00)

Born to rape? By Margaret Wertheim
All men are potential sex criminals, say two evolutionary psychology proponents in a controversial new book. (02/29/00)

Burroughs' last tape By Gary Kamiya
The final journals of Beat legend William S. Burroughs reveal the kinder, gentler last days of an "evil old man." (02/25/00)

Call the next witness By Jacqueline Carey
Our mystery columnist puts three legal thrillers on trial. (02/25/00)

Forced crossing By Pam Rosenthal
An involuntary traveler across the gender line -- and the first man who went under the knife to become a woman. (02/24/00)

Pros and amateurs By Ann Marlowe
One way or another, men still expect to pay for sex -- and women pay for it, too, by keeping their financial goals low. (02/24/00)

Hissy fit now By Laura Denham
Francis Ford Coppola's online writers workshop is part literary utopia, part hair-raising free-for-all. (02/22/00)

Polly Shulman on sci-fi and fantasy
The deliciously paranoid vision of Iain Banks (02/18/00)

Turning out the lights on the old New Yorker By Gavin McNett
Was it Utopia? Camelot? Paradise? Or does the possibility exist that, as fine as it once was, it was still just a magazine? (02/17/00)

It's how they take you anywhere By Beth Kephart
A Rudyard Kipling story is all I need to transport an after-school classroom of rowdy 9-year-olds. (02/16/00)

The way we clean now By Laura Morgan Green
Is "Home Comforts," the new bestseller on housecleaning, an essential reference work or a scary sign of anti-feminist backlash? (02/15/00)

New world orders By Melanie Rehak
Two new poetry collections, one that toys with the ghosts of the 20th century and one steeped in the pleasures of the here and now. (02/11/00)

$125 for my thoughts? By Diana Abu-Jaber
I never expected anyone to save all my letters -- but I really didn't think they'd sell them. (02/10/00)

Bogus bride By Andrew Richard Albanese
The University of Arizona Press passed off "I Married Wyatt Earp" as a historical document. It's not. (02/08/00)

Oversexed, talky and inspired By Ann Hodgman
Three new cookbooks run the gamut from the ridiculous to the truly essential. (02/04/00)

My favorite author, my worst interview By Donna Minkowitz
I worshipped militaristic Mormon science-fiction writer Orson Scott Card -- until we met. (02/03/00)

Footloose in Florida By Jaqueline Carey
There are always dark doings in the Sunshine State. (01/28/00)

The black edge By Gary Kamiya
Are athletes of African descent genetically superior? (01/28/00)

Eclipsed By Claire Dederer
In our two-writer household, my husband's literary star shines all too brightly. (01/25/00)

Drug cults, incest and the tooth fairy By Polly Shulman
Graham Joyce's dark visions walk the thin line between truth and nightmare. (01/21/00)

Bohemian rhapsodies By Dennis Drabelle
The hippies of the '60s reinvented drugs, sex and the family, but it took another generation to do the job right. (01/20/00)

Too close for comfort By Samantha Gillison
Why is Raymond Carver's masterpiece, "Cathedral," so much like a little-known D.H. Lawrence story? (01/18/00)

One a day, plus irony By Melanie Rehak
David Lehman made himself write a poem every day, and "The Daily Mirror" is the jazzy, joyful result. (01/14/00)

Harry Potter's girl trouble By Christine Schoefer
The world of everyone's favorite kid wizard is a place where boys come first. (01/13/00)

A shot of the needful By Emily Jenkins
How the P.G. Wodehouse newsgroup and its online version of Blandings Castle taught me play again. (01/11/00)

Unhand that butler! By David McDonough
Ask Jeeves and its new agent, Mike Ovitz, claim that their butler isn't Bertie Wooster's. (01/11/00)

Useless and uselesser By Ann Hodgman
Do we really need to know how to make what Sting eats for lunch? (01/07/00)

Writer's colony confidential By Matthew Specktor
Time to write, time to read, time to find out whether MacDowell really is a spawning ground for torrid affairs and illicit behavior. (01/04/00)

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