An American Balzac

Nicolaus Mills: John Updike's novels are essential for grasping America's transition from the Eisenhower 1950s to the Clinton 1990s

John Updike, RIP

Jeet Heer: The best of Updike's fiction was autobiographical, so it's hard for his readers not to take his death personally

Martin Amis on John Updike: Joyce thought certain things too embarrassing to be written down. Updike was congenitally unembarrassable

Editorial: In short stories as well as novels he made familiar the melancholy, sometimes the terror, of ordinary lives

Katha Pollitt: The economy is threatening our public libraries. Barack Obama must get the US back on the literary track

Obituary: Popular historian whose favourite subject was Italy

It is the bane of the modern world. It is cheap, nasty and heralds a new cultural dark age. It is 'snark'

Soldiers will sit down this evening to haggis, neeps and tatties at their base in Afghanistan

Edna O'Brien's Byron in Love, Burns' frenetic pursuits and Jeffrey A Lockwood's frightening latest book

Roby Alampay: Thailand's draconian lese-majesty law is a blunt instrument that Thais can too easily turn on foreigners – and each other

Naomi Wolf used to think the pen was the best weapon against injustice. Not any more

Chloe Schama: More people may be reading fiction, but publishers and booksellers must get real if they are going to survive

Author Vikas Swarup on Slumdog Millionaire and how the book started taking shape in, well, Golders Green

Jon Blyth: I knew who I was and what I thought - but all that dissolved in one thrilling second

Shall we ever be released from the spell cast by Hitler and his gang of psychopaths, asks Robert McCrum