At Slate Deborah Blum writes about the height of Prohibition madness.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

At Slate Stephen Metcalf rereads John Knowles’s A Separate Peace for its fiftieth anniversary.

Rereading A Separate Peace for the first time in 30 years, I was surprised to discover its setting is the least anachronistic thing about it. A Separate Peace takes place at a New Hampshire prep school modeled not at all loosely on Exeter, where Knowles had been a student in the ’40s. Movies like Dead Poets Society, about boys knuckling under to a rheumatic American upper class and its to-the-hounds! institutions, derive from a lazy reading of A Separate Peace. A Separate Peace derives, for better and worse, from the thing itself.

At Slate Judith Shulevitz reviews Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

Meloy’s grasp of our civic abdication is clear-sighted, large-hearted, and desperately necessary. Her pity flows most abundantly for its victims. This is an understandable sentiment but also, at times, a literary liability. Meloy feels such anguish for the innocent that she cleaves to them almost too closely. There is a superabundance here of the child’s point of view.

Farhad Manjoo at Slate covers Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books.

The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here’s one way around this: Don’t buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.

At Slate Nathaniel Rich examines the appeal of Scandinavian crime fiction.

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness.

For Slate Michael Wood reviews Gerald Martin’s Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

Slate has Johann Hari’s review of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.

. . . Raffel’s translation loses the original’s music without finding a music of its own; he is wordy where the original is pithy and bare where the original is lush. Chaucer is in many ways the progenitor of English fiction—he is closer to Dickens than to Keats—but he is also a great master of English poetry; and since poetry is what is lost in translation, why not take the trouble to read the original and avoid the loss?

At Slate Adam Kirsch reviews Burton Raffel’s translation of The Canterbury Tales.

There is in an important way no difference between her own experience and a particularly absorbing book she might be reading. One can’t help but admire the intricate mental apparatus at work: She is writing notes on her notes. These private jottings are, like her famous essays, almost entirely abstract and cerebral: She almost never describes the physical world, what the sky looked like, the smell of orange trees in Seville, or what she and her lover ate for breakfast.

At Slate Katie Roiphe reviews Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963.

At Slate Ron Rosenbaum sounds the new-media warning bell.

At Slate, Adam Kirsch reviews Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

. . .now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist.

Writing for Slate, Adam Kirsch probes the Nobel chasm.

Slate has Sara Mosle’s review of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes.

[The book] is an inspirational story about one man’s efforts to boost educational achievement in New York City’s Harlem. The book is also a sobering tale of how such good intentions, alone, are often not enough. Put the two together, and you have everything you need to know not only about inner-city education, poverty, and charter schools but about the realism that is essential to ambitious reform.

Slate has a collection of photographs of Hemingway.

Writing for Slate, Ray Fisman explains why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.

At Slate Jim Lewis celebrates Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo.

Vladimir Nabokov gave specific instructions that his final and unfinished novel be destroyed. The manuscript has resided in a Swiss bank vault in the years since his death, but Ron Rosenbaum reports at Slate that Dmitri, Nabokov’s son, now 73, nears a decision.

Slate’s Book Club discusses Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy.

Slate’s Fall Fiction Week looks at great works never read, Philip Roth’s alter ego, books of the season, and more.

He was the greatest union organizer of the latter half of the 20th century. In the span of a single decade, the 1960s, Albert Shanker did for public school teachers what Walter Reuther did for autoworkers.

At Slate Sara Mosle reviews Richard Kahlenberg’s Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy.

At Slate, David Shenk revisits his 1997 book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut.

Slate recycles an article from 2004 to help explain the phenomenon of the instant review.

In his review for Slate of Ben Wilson’s The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain: 1789-1837, Michael Chase-Levenson asks: Why are we still so obsessed with the Victorians?

Slate has an article on John Banville’s (writing as Benjamin Black but disclosing that fact on the jacket) Christine Falls.

But what is the point of taking on a pseudonym only to identify it as such immediately? And what are we to make of the simplistic art/craft distinction he has used to defend this noir effort? One suspects that Banville, like the archly unreliable poet-madmen who have narrated his previous novels for almost 20 years, is playing games with us.

Yes, one does suspect.

Slate has an obituary of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian and author of works such as The Age of Jackson.

Slate is running a review of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford.

So asks the article at Slate.

Slate has a review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The reviewer expresses surprise that the book was deemed “Best Of” list material and provides a well-reasoned exploration of why works of “precocious realism” are not suitable for such lists.

Slate has a short article on businesses that refuse to accept cash. The mind boggles.

Slate has an article on authors’ sometimes absurd efforts at cultivating mindshare, with a focus on Hemingway’s exploits and ad copy.

“Some Kind of Wonderful is the prolier-than-thou retelling of Pretty in Pink” begins an unexpected article at Slate. Why should anyone care about such pop culture twaddle? The thrust of the article may surprise–it is the political conservatism of John Hughes.