So what’s your reaction to all of this?

[deadpan] Reaction to what?

Even before many people read the book, there’s been so much meta-reaction. What do you think, watching this from the center of it?

On a serious note, what I think is that these issues run deep. This is serious stuff. This is about who we are as a people and our expectations for our lives and our partnerships and our families, and I think people are really passionate about this. What I’m extremely worried about is stagnation and apathy, and the fact that women have had the same percentage of the leadership jobs in our country for 10 years and people don’t seem to notice or care. If this current debate gets us out of that, and makes us wake up and realize this, I think it’s a really good thing.

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Indeed, Eugenides -- like Jonathan Franzen -- is that rare writer so successful with both readers and critics that he tends to be at the center of debates that have nothing to do with his work. "The Marriage Plot" (just available in paperback) made plenty of top-10 lists but was shut out from the list of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists -- stoking arguments about whether those awards were out of touch with readers. (It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award; 2002's "Middlesex" won the Pulitzer.)

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Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue” calls our attention, literally and figuratively, to the other end of the street, where Telegraph crosses the city line and becomes the main drag of the Temescal district, a racially and economically mixed neighborhood in northwest Oakland. That’s where Archy Stallings, a 36-year-old African-American Gulf War vet who is the novel’s central character, and his Jewish partner Nat Jaffe (whose background resembles Chabon’s own) are not so slowly running a vintage vinyl emporium called Brokeland Records into the ground. It’s the summer of 2004, and a wealthy former NFL star and Oakland native, Gibson “G-Bad” Goode, is planning to open an immense new retail-entertainment complex – called, wonderfully, the “Dogpile Thang” – four blocks away, applying the coup de grace to Archy and Nat’s failing business.

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That wouldn't be enough protection. The fatwa -- a death sentence handed down for writing a novel, "The Satanic Verses," which many Muslims believed stood "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran" -- would stand for another nine years. For many months, fiery protests filled the streets of Muslim cities, but also in London, where Rushdie lived. His book was burned. His translators were attacked; one was even killed. Priests and politicians and protesters demanded he apologize. But Rushdie was an artist. His book was fiction. There was nothing to apologize for.

Principle came with a cost. The fatwa would erase Rushdie's 40s. It would stall the work of a novelist whose first book, "Midnight's Children," won the Booker Prize. It would cost him at least one marriage, and separate him from his young son far too many times. And as Rushdie writes in his new memoir, "Joseph Anton," he often thought that near-decade in hiding would cost him his sanity.

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Lifelong fertility, artificial wombs, “pseudo-sperm” – it sounds like the stuff of dystopian sci-fi, but a new book suggests it’s an inevitable reality. In “Like a Virgin: How Science Is Redefining the Rules of Sex,” author Aarathi Prasad writes, "This would be the great biological and social equalizer, a truly new way of thinking about sex. The question is not if it will happen, but when." It isn’t just women who stand to benefit, either: Artificial wombs will actually give men "more potential than women to make a baby without the opposite sex,” says Prasad, a biologist and science writer. The takeaway is that "male plus female equals baby will no longer be our only path forward.”

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Yet what’s even more admirable is how strong-willed she is. It comes across in her work, in her attention to characters who are often stuck in terrible situations. It absolutely comes across in her most recent collection of short stories, "Black Dahlia & White Rose," where Oates often translates the ordinariness of everyday life into a psychological drama.

And it was on display in our recent interview, over email, in which she called Mitt Romney "ghastly," questioned whether there's a "glass ceiling" for women writers and said while she regrets nothing, she does wish she hadn't written so many critical reviews of other writers early in her career.

I’d like to talk about your writing process in general. I’ve read that you still write your drafts by hand. Why is that? 

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The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can't escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem's case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) --  from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of  "Fear of Music" to the aftermath of his mother's death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and '79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.

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Most people don't know they even take place. Now, "Monday Mornings," a novel by Sanjay Gupta -- CNN's chief medical correspondent and a practicing neurosurgeon at Atlanta's Emory University -- lifts the veil on these gatherings.

While driving one of his three daughters to school last week, Gupta, 42, talked to Salon about his bestselling first novel, how doctors can do better, and the controversial ethics of being both journalist and physician.

What made you decide to leap into fiction?

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In "Mad Women" -- part memoir and part informal survey of friends and colleagues -- former advertising executive Jane Maas (billed as a "real-life Peggy Olson") offers insights into the art of advertising, the pervasive "guilt" felt by working mothers past and present, and the culture of sex (and sexism) at the office.

In a phone interview, Maas expanded on the experiences she describes in the book, and graded "Mad Men's" accuracy against her personal experiences.

What was your first reaction to "Mad Men"?

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McMillan spent months exploring the American food system from three different angles: picking produce in California fields, working in two Michigan Walmarts, and expediting (organizing the flow of food from the kitchen to the dining room) at a Brooklyn, N.Y., Applebee's. By turns analytical and anecdotal, her book marshals first-person experience, history and current research to paint a picture of America's 21st-century food reality.

McMillan asks why the distribution of good, healthy food -- easy access to which she considers a human right -- is so often left to private companies, begging us to change the conversation from one about what people eat (she thinks that given the choice, people will eat relatively healthily) to one about healthy food's accessibility.

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Builders, be warned: This is not an instruction manual. Instead, Diedricksen's book is bursting with abstract creative concepts, all outlined in eye-popping, full-page black-and-white comic-book-style drawings (you can see some examples -- along with a number of photographs -- in the slide show that accompanies this piece).

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As much as people look to Gibson as a prophet, the science-fiction writer who invented the term “cyberspace” (in the 1982 short story “Burning Chrome”) helped conceptualize the ways we interact with the Web (in 1984’s "Neuromancer" and later works) and foretold the explosion of reality TV (in 1993’s "Virtual Light") is notoriously reluctant to predict the future. The title of his new collection of journalism and essays, "Distrust That Particular Flavor," is taken from a piece on H.G. Wells where Gibson explains his suspicion of “the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever.” Though he’s often able to extrapolate from the present with great prescience, Gibson prefers to probe, not prescribe.

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That's one of the ideas addressed by journalist Maura Kelly and writer (and medieval literature scholar) Jack Murnighan in their new book, "Much Ado About Loving," which draws advice on matters of courtship, sex and marriage from authors as diverse as Virgil and Sylvia Plath.

Over email, the pair told Salon about their inspiration for the project -- and some of its most surprising revelations.

How did you two start working together, and how did the idea for this book emerge?

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But just as fascinating is the hard science behind our intimate relationship with food. Gordon M. Shepherd, professor of neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, has spent a lifetime researching the brain mechanisms involved in olfaction (our sense of smell) and its impact on flavor perception in the brain. His new book is “Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters,” out this month from Columbia University Press. Shepherd’s work is anchored in a burgeoning field within neuroscience -- figuring out the mysteries behind our olfactory system, the ways in which smells are represented and processed in the brain.

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Recently, Gaiman kicked his advocacy up a notch by agreeing to hand-select and produce a line of audiobooks in partnership with the audio download retailer Audible.com. Neil Gaiman Presents released its first five titles last month; they include the novel "Land of Laughs" by Jonathan Carroll and "You Must Go and Win" by musician-turned-essayist Aline Simone. Future releases will include books by the early 20th-century American author James Branch Cabell (the target of a once-notorious censorship suit for writing an "offensive, lewd, lascivious and indecent book") and "Dimension of Miracles" by Robert Sheckley, a work Gaiman likens to "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and which will be narrated by television personality John Hodgman.

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Now both Meloys have new young-adult novels in stores. Colin's adventure-fantasy, "Wildwood," is a collaboration with his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis, and the first of a planned trilogy. As the New York Times notes, it "brims with grimly comic violence. Coyotes dressed in Napoleonic uniforms train musket, cannon and bayonet on woodland bandits, talking birds and an industrious rat named Septimus." Maile, meanwhile, steps away from her realist adult fiction with a fantasy of her own, "The Apothecary," brimming with teenage spies, Cold War fears, magical elixirs and thrilling first kisses.

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Derr acknowledges that the story of the dog's emergence (as distinct from its evolutionary forebear, the wolf) cannot be “neatly distilled." Different estimates place the first appearance of dog-like creatures anywhere from 12,000 to 135,000 years ago. But Derr argues that the dog itself was an “evolutionary inevitability." He suggests that dogs and humans  -- similar animals who “simply took to traveling with each other” tens of thousands of years ago, “and never stopped” -- have had a significant influence on each others’ development over the course of a long, co-evolutionary relationship.

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