Now the VLS has more than 400,000 readers nationwide. Here is the first collection of its criticism, including pieces by Edmund White, Dorothy Allison, Henry Louis Gates, and Greil Marcus -- all who express their love for books with a sense of riskiness, urgency, and fun.

War of the Words explores a range of topics, from old-guard authors (David Foster Wallace on Dostoyevsky) to contemporary renegades (Peter Schjeldahl on Dennis Cooper), and genre writing (Jonathan Lethem on science fiction) to cultural and literary trends, and all points in between. Bringing together some of the most exhilarating writing from the VLS, War of the Words delivers a fresh and complex new perspective.