Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.

After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.

As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system-the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges-would take care of that; they didn't need his help.

Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.

I have a hard time isolating what it is in myself that makes me so fascinated with the theme of identity, because I came from a normal upper middle-class family. And yet, as I look back at my books, the uses of power, issues of identity, they have - it's recurrent. It happens again and again.