The long read: Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end?

From James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Nicholson Baker, the ‘circadian novel’ can pack lifetimes of experience into 24 hours

With Dalloway Day falling on Wednesday, Alex Clark picks books with a time limit – from Ulysses to a novel set over a lunchbreak

A gushing love letter to the French capital features De Beauvoir, Sartre, Samuel Beckett and wave after and wave of oversexed, overpaid Americans

In his obsessive pursuit of Saul Bellow, biographer James Atlas found his own compelling story to tell

Amis is sublime on JG Ballard, writes Anne Enright, but she is less convinced by his views on Islam, ‘foreigners’ and war

On Father’s Day a parent and novelist asks if the ‘pram in the hall’ is quite the obstacle to literary success it used to be

The journalist grew up on New York’s Upper East Side with her mother, a celebrated poet who partied with Andy Warhol and Saul Bellow. Now she’s lifting the lid on a deeply unhappy childhood

From Edith Wharton to Jennifer Egan, the city has inspired countless stories, all of them sharing one major character – the metropolis itself

After the horrors of the early 20th century, a generation of writers and thinkers questioned the purpose of humanity as never before