Stone, Walls and PathsBy Yim Seock-jaeTranslated by Lee Jean-young(Ewha Womans University Press)Anyone who has been to a hanok, or traditional Korean house, will have noticed its exquisite use of stone and wood, and how it naturally blends into its surroundings. Wood and stone are the most representative natural materials used in Korea’s traditional architecture, serving both practical and aesthetic purposes.Scholar Yim Seock-jae’s English-translated book, “Stone, Walls and Paths,” is an insight

LOS ANGELES ― When it came to reading a book out loud, Dustin Hoffman was a bit rusty. The last time he had done something similar was in New York City in the late 1960s, right after filming “The Graduate.” A local radio station had recruited 30 or so people, including Hoffman, to read “War and Peace” on air, around the clock, until it was done.“That was the only other time I had done something like that, and it was wonderful,” recalls Hoffman, explaining why he recently agreed to perform the no

The Lost DaughterBy Lucy Ferriss (Penguin)If all the bad choices people made as teenagers returned to haunt them as adults, the world would be filled with fearful and guilt-ridden people.Most people get away with those bad choices with few repercussions, but in Lucy Ferriss’ novel “The Lost Daughter,” they come back big for Brooke O’Connor.Brooke lives in Connecticut with her husband, Sean, who is from a big Irish-Catholic family. But Brooke and Sean have only one child, a daughter named Meghan,

Gods Without MenBy Hari Kunzru(Knopf)Early in “Gods Without Men,” Hari Kunzru’s ambitious and wonderful new novel, a strung-out British rock star stares into the big night sky hanging over the Mojave Desert.“The stars were like pinholes in a cloth,” he marvels. “You could believe you were seeing through to some incredibly bright world on the other side of the darkness.”It’s a great image, in a book filled with terrific writing.But it’s also a pithy description of the dangerous American dream tha

Norigae: Splendor of the Korean CostumeBy Lee Kyung-jaTranslated by Lee Jean-youngEwha Womans University PressFor anyone who is familiar with Korea’s traditional costume, hanbok, the term “norigae” will ring a bell. A decorative pendant hung from the inner or outer tie of jeogori, the upper piece of a hanbok, norigae carries both aesthetic and emotional traces of women from the Joseon era (1392-1897).Scholar Lee Kyung-ja’s English-translated book, “Norigae: Splendor of the Korean Costume” offers

Ellen Ullman is the author of “By Blood” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2012), a tale set in San Francisco in the ’70s, which involves an eavesdropper whose fascination leads to research into Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi Lebensborn program. Discoveries from her research for that book have touched her deeply.“The Bug,” recently reprinted by Picador, was a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the cult classic memoir, “Close to the Machine” (also reprinted by

MADRID (AFP) ― A “lost” novel by Portuguese Nobel literature laureate Jose Saramago which he wrote in the 1950s before he achieved international acclaim has been published nearly two years after his death.Saramago sent the manuscript for “Claraboya,” which tells the tale of residents of a Lisbon apartment building, through a friend to a Portuguese publishing house in 1953 but never heard back from them.But in 1989, after the author had become one of Portugal’s best-selling contemporary writers,