Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Lesser has been reading crime fiction for decades — Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle but also French and Japanese thrillers ...

Thirty-five years ago, Wendy Lesser decided to start a magazine. It was a bold move by the then-27-year-old UC Berkeley graduate student. At the time, Lesser was eking out a modest living as a ...

Michael Dirda has done it. So has Francine Prose. And Alberto Manguel, and Larry McMurtry, and David Shields, and Maureen Corrigan, and Anne Fadiman (over and over again). The Very Personal Book About ...

In the prologue of Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, Wendy Lesser explains what she'll be expecting from her readers: "I hope that, in the course of reading this small book about a rather ...

Reading Wendy Lesser can be like getting in touch with a fascinating, infuriating, brilliant but ultimately rather exhausting old friend from college. You know that you'll come away from the encounter ...

Ever since Beethoven's time it has been a cliche to describe the string quartet - that intimate, deeply personal genre originally designed for no other listeners than the performers themselves - as a ...

Wendy Lesser’s new book, “Scandinavian Noir,” dissects and investigates a genre with which the author grew obsessed long before it became a global phenomenon. (Read the Times’ profile here.) It all ...

Many readers’ awareness of Scandinavian crime fiction began 15 years ago with Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster Millennium trilogy, the series that sent a tidal wave of Nordic noir across the North Atlantic ...