Charlie English begins “The CIA Book Club” by describing a 1970s technical manual: a dull cover, as uninviting as anything. A book that practically begs you to put it back on the shelf and move on.

Author and critic Lincoln Michel talks about Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai's Nobel win and what it shows about who gets recognized in world literature.

I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural ...