Toni Morrison

Gay couples should be treated like children under the law and more clever ideas from our fearless political leaders.

When Gish Jen delivered the Massey lectures in American history at Harvard in 2012—now published as Tiger Writing—the daughter of Chinese immigrants examined the East-West divide, not only in child-rearing but in fiction writing. Almost every novelist has had to contend with the question of “what is fiction,” and Jen picks her favorite lectures on writing, from Nabokov’s attention to detail, to a meditation on Edwidge Danticat’s immigrant experience, to Toni Morrison’s own Massey lecture.

It’s banned books week, and also the 25th anniversary of the publication of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a classic that explores the legacy of slavery not with reductive moralizing but with psychological and narrative depth and complexity. But its frankness with race, violence and sex has made it a controversial choice in school curricula. Anna Clark looks at how the seminal novel is being taught to students.

Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and many more honored Norman Mailer’s memory Tuesday night with the first annual gala celebrating his writers’ colony. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

TRL goes dark, Arianna Huffington (maybe) subs for Maddow, and Diane Sawyer interviews Ashley Dupre, the prostitute at the center of the Spitzer scandal.