Stieg Larsson’s punishing murder mystery made an icon out of Lisbeth Salander. Here’s how it came to be.

Great writers can assemble words into sentences that sing, flow, and teach. And in some cases, they can invent them. James Joyce ( Ulysses) was a profligate coiner of words, including ripripple ...

It’s a compressing of an earlier phrase that also yielded variations like ‘nilling, willing’ and ‘william-nilliam.’ ...