After 15 years of editing the Washington Post Book World section, Marie Arana departed with a final post at Short Stack, the book section's blog.

Arana is leaving the Post to pursue a full-time writing career. Her last post mourned the loss of three notable authors this year, David Foster Wallace, Arthur C. Clarke and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

She concluded with some thoughts about her paper's traditional dedication to books coverage, calling it the best in the country. Her thoughts: "Few newspapers value books as deeply as The Washington Post does, and I consider myself fortunate to work for an institution whose owners and chief executives (the Graham family) have made their support for books coverage abundantly clear."