This column was written by Dan Kellum. Wired members of the literary world knew about Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize before she did, and her first response was an almost studied lack of interest to the ...

In recent years the life of cultivated people has been marked by a fierce attachment to "personal values." I put the phrase in quote marks to point toward something more problematic than the usual web ...

Close watchers of the Nobel Prize for Literature look at the selection process as a kind of geopolitical checkers match, as the Swedish Academy plucks major figures from the national literatures of ...

If you’re writing a novel about the nineteen-sixties, then you’re writing a historical novel, for the nineteen-sixties were a long time ago, and everyone knows how things turned out. And if you're ...

In Doris Lessing's 1983 novel, The Diary of a Good Neighbour (originally published under the pseudonym Jane Somers), the narrator finds herself noticing an almost invisible section of the population: ...

In 1920s Rhodesia, leopards and snakes roamed the bush. Yet for 6-year-old Doris Lessing, this inhospitable environment offered a welcome refuge from her parents: Alfred, a soldier whose leg had been ...

Of course I read The Golden Notebook as soon as it came out. Everyone did. But I took against it. I and most of my friends, who were more or less the same age as Doris Lessing, felt, as she did, that ...