McSweeney's, a small publishing house launched by Dave Eggers, has served as the career start for several young authors such as Rick Moody, Chris Adrian, and Paul LaFarge. Biblio.com takes a look at how McSweeney's has inspired a new generation of writers and readers to engage in a refreshing intellectual dialogue about books. Read more >>

What better than a book to describe obsessive book love, especially when it's a love gone wrong? Bern and Margot discuss Flaubert's Bibliomanie, a work of journalistic fiction published when the famous author was only fifteen years old. Read more >>

Check out these writers whose first work was published before the age of 30:

• Amelia Atwater-Rhodes--best known for In the Forests of the Night and was named one of 20 Teens Who Will Change the World by Teen People Magazine
• Sylvia Plath--published The Bell Jar shortly before her suicide at age 30.
• David Foster Wallace--His famous work The Infinite Jest received critical praise from literary greats such as Thomas Pynchon.
• Jonathan Safran Foer--Born in 1977, Foer's Everything is Illuminated was published when he was 25 and has since been adapted to film.
• Judy Budnitz wrote her debut novel If I Told You Once and was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2003.
• Claire Messud--author of When the World Was Steady, has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was long-listed as well for the Man Booker Prize in 2006.
• Christopher Paolini--started writing the bestselling novel Eragon when he was 15, and was published by Knopf when he was 19.

Mozart began writing symphonies when he was nine years old. S.E. Hinton began writting her first novel, The Outsiders, when she was 15 years old. Maybe this isn't a fair comparison, but at an age when most of us are planning what to do for summer break, Hinton and a handful of precocious writers have been able to take their young experiences and turn them into art. Read more >>

All genres are up for grabs in our eclectic mix of favorite books this month. Check it out >>

The Walls of Cartagena by Julia Durango
Reviewed by: feeney

THE WALLS OF CARTAGENA is an historical novelette in the genre created by Sir Walter Scott. Its great world-historical backdrop is the American empire of Spain, especially its silver-producing Caribbean Basin. The dirty, hot port city of Cartagena in today's Colombia is the hub of Spain's trade in slaves imported, then bred to work silver mines and sugar plantations. Read more >>