Kimberly King Parsons salutes Eileen Myles, Denis Johnson, and other voices she “would follow anywhere”

Photos: Wendell Berry and friends celebrate What I Stand On

Nathaniel Philbrick asks Why Read Moby-Dick? and many rise to the “cunning test”

Stephen Colbert’s two-minute Moby-Dick lesson is a real roller-coaster ride

E. L. Doctorow pays tribute to Herman Melville’s great “kitchen-sink sort of book”

From 2013: A birthday tribute to Toni Morrison

Coming attractions: LOA hits the trail, rounds up four classics in The Western

Wendell Berry, “The Rise”

Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd: Elemental conflict in a vivid tapestry of life at sea

Wai Chee Dimock: Reading American literature outside the box

Booth Tarkington, “The Need of Money”

We will film them on the beaches: Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day

Nancy Hale, “The Empress’s Ring”

John Logan on James Fenimore Cooper: “Dive in and get reading”

Stifled yearnings and bittersweet small-town comedy in Alice Adams

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A show of wax-figures”