Sure, you picked up a book or two last year. You tore through God Is Not Great, nodding in agreement along the way. You read Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows on the Metro, brandishing the cover proudly and caring little that anyone saw you. You read a lot of graphic novels. And, then, just for grins and giggles, you picked up The Divine Comedy in the original Italian. Okay, maybe you read this version…

FRIDAY: >> Bay Area songstress Goapele’s (pictured) musical background is almost as diverse as her ethnic background. Born to a South African political exile father and a mother whose parents survived the Holocaust, she studied at the Berklee College of Music and later would form musical partnerships with the likes of hip-hop acts like the Hieroglyphics crew and E-40. However her 2005 release, Change It All, established her as especially talented when it comes to…

D.C. culture may have its faults, but laziness certainly isn’t one of them. We work hard here (and, according to a recent Men’s Health poll, we play hard, too). We work so hard that many organizations and companies, particularly those in D.C., try to recruit new employees by promising a “work-life balance” — something that used to be called simply “time off” or “after 5 p.m.” only a few short years ago. In a culture…

Poet Brad Leithauser, who’ll be reading from his latest collection of poetry, Toad to a Nightingale, Saturday afternoon at Politics and Prose, published his first collection of poetry, Hundreds of Fireflies, in 1982. He was probably unprepared for the attention it received, not so much for what it contained, but for what it lacked: the collection was, for the most part, completely absent of poetry influenced by High-Modernist, experimental “free verse.” In other words: poetry…

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and local resident Tim Weiner won the National Book Award’s nonfiction category for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A., a sweeping 600-page critical history of the agency with a particular emphasis on the intelligence failures that have occurred during the agency’s relatively short period of existence. “Legacy of Ashes,” writes Weiner, “is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. It describes how…

“Writing is easy,” wrote legendary sportswriter Red Smith. “Just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” Though most of us no longer sit at typewriters nor face blank pieces of physical paper, there’s nothing more daunting than a blank screen and the notion of putting something meaningful on it. Compound that with the idea of doing that for approximately 200 pages and you begin to realize why a lot of novelists end up…

In England, being named poet laureate is a lot like being named to the U.S. Supreme Court: once there, you’re there for life. More importantly, you’re expected to be the living, breathing embodiment of a tradition, of an institution constructed entirely of words, texts, precedent. And, though you aren’t expected to wear robes when performing your job, you are expected to pen occasional verses on the birth of a royal or on the opening of…

You’d think that, once the Almighty found himself on the business end of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens’ latest broadside, there’d be hell to pay. Instead, Hitchens’ book became an international bestseller, racking up laudatory reviews and garnering an even larger audience for his witty contrarianism. Which makes one suspect that perhaps The Hitch is on to something. As if it needed more attention, yesterday God Is Not Great was named one of five…