Keeping mum in the age of spoilers.For about four months I have kept a secret. Because few people knew that I had it, the difficulty wasn’t in resisting others’ demand to know but in quashing my own desire to tell. Still, the challenge was signif…

  “Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’” —Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut A well-constructed e-mail and some guts on my part had one day inspired Harold Bloom to send me the phone number of his editor. A few …

Upon the occasion of Philip Roth’s eightieth birthday, acclaimed critic and biographer Hermione Lee likened the newly retired writer first to Shakespeare and then to one of his creations, The Tempest’s Prospero, who famously invokes the audie…