Edmund Wilson

NEW YORK — Judy Garland, often drunk and occasionally disheveled, in Peter Quilter's biographical drama "End of the Rainbow," is rummaging for booze in her suite at the Ritz hotel. She's wired, and not simply because of the pills she can't seem to...

Each week, The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar -- another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. Use it in a sentence in a comment on his blog, You Don't Say, and the...

Letters Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Viking: 608 pp, $35 Saul Bellow, being Saul Bellow, coined literary profit from emotional tumult. From personal pain came self-exploration and impish bons mots, poured into the heightened confessional of...

Joaquin Phoenix makes a return appearance to "Late Show with David Letterman" on Wednesday, September 22, and two days later hits the Charles in the controversial documentary "I'm Still Here," which chronicles his attempt to switch from acting to rap....

Out this week, just in time for Octoberfest, is "Drunk: the Definitive Drinkers Dictionary." A sleek, gray hardcover of manageable size, the book contains no less than 2,964 synonyms for drunk. "The English language includes more synonyms for the word.......

Ever gone out and felt, well, not casters-up, not entirely not nearly blotto, but some kind of subtle gradation of drunk? Perhaps you'd find exactly the right turn of phrase in the new book 'Drunk: the Definitive Drinkers Dictionary,' out this week -- it'...

Book Banning In 1946 two Los Angeles booksellers were arrested for selling copies of Edmund Wilson's "Memoirs of Hecate County," which had been banned. The book was ruled obscene and they were convicted. Now, 13 years later, a new edition of "Hecate"...

In 1999, the L.A. Times asked dozens of writers to look back at the prior century and share books they considered lost treasures -- books they loved that had slipped out of sight. Although the authors were formidable -- including......

All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty's Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary. It was April 1939, and she...

Out this week, just in time for Octoberfest, is "Drunk: The Definitive Drinkers Dictionary." The book contains no fewer than 2,964 synonyms for "drunk." "The English language includes more synonyms for the word 'drunk' than for any other word," writes...

Richard Poirier, a literary critic and writer who was one of the founders of the Library of America, a monumental effort to keep American literary classics in print and accessible to the reading public, died Aug. 15 at Roosevelt Hospital in New York. He...

In his 1985 breakout novel, "Less Than Zero," Bret Easton Ellis, then all of 21 years old, created young, jaded Angelenos who just didn't care about anything: They recounted cocaine scores and semi-anonymous sex in the same tone with which they lamented...