The secrets of Scientology are not so secret anymore. Magazine articles, personal testimonials and even a “South Park” episode have exposed the deepest doctrines of the be...

Presidents talk a lot — it’s part of their job. And some of the words they use are pretty interesting, particularly to Paul Dickson, author of the new book “Words from t...

Who keeps us sane in troubled times? It’s Calvin Trillin, pundit poet. He reformats the news in rhymes, Which sounds so tough to us — although it Makes some old jokes newl...

Behind every great Washington-area chef is a great tale: a childhood memory, a professional U-turn, a reality-TV competition, an unswerving love for the community. That’s ev...

Self-described “dissident feminist” writer and professor Camille Paglia has made a career of questioning (usually with pointed, arch humor) pretty much everything in cultu...

The subtitle for David Skinner’s book “The Story of Ain’t” could have been “Word Nerds Fight It Out.” Instead, Skinner, who will speak at Politics and Prose on Sun...

Poet Mary Oliver speaks in much the same way that she writes. Which is to say that the 77-year-old Pulitzer and National Book Award winner drops phrases in casual conversation...

Zadie Smith, one of the western world’s most prominent young novelists, has a new book out: “NW.” There’s no way you’ll have time to finish it before her reading Thu...

Though the epithet “People of the Book” refers to Jews’ devotion to the Torah, we feel it can be more inclusive during the Jewish Literary Festival. People of the Biogra...

A.M. Homes’ writing — fiction and non — is daring and dangerous: Like Raymond Carver (the early ’80s king of irredeemable characters), Homes, 50, brings readers inside...

Now that the presidential debates have begun, everybody’s got an opinion about how this thing is going to turn out. Some have loud, kind of paranoid ones. Others have more r...

If you were a teenage girl in the ’80s, actor Andrew McCarthy was probably your dream prom date. But the yin to Molly Ringwald’s yang in “Pretty in Pink” and the star ...

Lynn Povich was a “good girl,” a smart, well-educated woman from D.C. who landed a job as a fact-checker at Newsweek in the 1960s — back when Newsweek never hired women ...

It’s not often that folklorists get mistaken for crazed killers, but when Stephen Wade visited a small Mississippi town to research his new book, “The Beautiful Music All ...

For the past 20 years, “Goosebumps” series author R.L. Stine has been writing the stuff of nightmares: Tiny hamsters turn evil! A teacher develops an appetite for children...