The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Isn’t Just Fiction Anymore

Today's Sweden Has Come to Resemble the Dark World Stieg Larsson Created for His Hacker Heroine

We are standing in front of a magnificent building at Fiskargatan 9 in Södermalm, Stockholm’s bohemian southern island. The penthouse once belonged to a controversial businessman, Percy Barnevik, the former CEO of the Swiss-Swedish energy giant ABB, but he’s not its most famous resident.

“On the top floor, Lisbeth Salander rented an apartment with 21 rooms,” says Ylva, my friendly and enthusiastic guide. For just 130 Swedish krona ($15) you, too, can join Ylva on a walking tour across Södermalm, the home base of late crime journalist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium …

The Serious Business of Pulp Fiction

How Paperbacks Helped Forge Our Modern Ideas about Sex, Race, and War

Cheap paperback books are like sex: They claim attention, elicit memories good and bad, and get talked about endlessly. The mid-20th century was the era of pulp, which landed in …

My Country ’Tis a Book

Are We Still Searching for ‘The Great American Novel’?

Most credentialed literary critics disdain it as a grandiose hyperbole, and creative writers tend to speak of it in jest. But for almost 150 years, all of us—writers, readers, cultural …

Language is Not Always a Question of Logic

Some people keep artificial plants, others artificial hearts.
Some keep nothing. It does not matter. The truth of the world
has nothing to do with the real. Every day the …

The Gift

An L.A. Christmas Story

New York has

Why Can’t Older Californians Act Like Grown-Ups?

While an Aging Generation Has More and More Fun, Young Californians Are Stuck on a Treadmill of Work and Responsibility

At a moment like this, younger Californians should read Mona Simpson.

The novelist, who is also a UCLA English professor, may be best known these days as Steve Jobs’ biological …