Status Updates From Under the Covers and betwee...

In a letter written the year after his book's publication, Mark Twain wrote, "The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass., have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as 'trash and suitable only for the slums.' that will sell 25,000 copies for us sure."

Catch-22 is one of those terms that is more often misused than not. As described in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel of the same name, Catch-22 is a rule or set of circumstances that inherently denies a solution to a problem, usually by employing circular logic.

Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939): Though many writers had written shorter works under similar conditions, Wright challenged himself to write a complete novel without using the letter "e": The 50,110-word Gadsby is the staggering result. The preface notes that as he wrote, "a whole army of little E's gathered around my desk, all eagerly expecting to be called upon."