There’s a subtle arc to Jim Gavin’s first book, “Middle Men” (Simon & Schuster). Gathering seven stories largely set in Southern California, it opens with a high school basketball player and ends with Marty Costello, a plumbing supply salesman who “averages 50,000 miles per year, vast territories, circles of latitude, Inglewood to Barstow, sailing across SoCal, all day every day.”In between, we meet men of different ages, from Costello’s adult son Matt, also trying to make it in the plumbing sup

Kim Eun-ho, the head of local publishing house Hangilsa Publishing, has been appointed as the new chairman of Bookcity Culture Foundation, the organization said.Kim, who graduated from ChungAng University, worked as a reporter for major local daily Dong-A Ilbo from 1968 to 1975. He founded his publishing house Hangilsa Publishing in 1976, and has served a number of significant positions in the publishing industry ever since. In 2011, he served as the head of the Paju BookSori Festival’s organizi

What a conversation it was.The Book of Job. Hippos. The road life. The writer’s life (which, more and more these days, is the road life). Philly. Iowa. Rutgers. Bryn Mawr. Florida. Kafka. Dorothy Day. George Saunders (more on him later). Sharing an apartment with your sister. A bumper-car arcade of ideas and language.Such is an hour of talk with writer Karen Russell, sitting around her apartment near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sparkling notion-eruptions and prismed, faceted phrases. Her 201

PhantomBy Jo Nesbø(Knopf)I once suggested that some Nordic crime novels are Jackie Collins or Harold Robbins with enough mildly leftist musing thrown in to make readers feel intellectually respectable. One reply to that comment put it this way:“It’s why I think ‘Downton Abbey’ does so well in this country, too. It’s basically an absurdly trashy soap opera, a notch or two down from the magnificent ‘Days of Our Lives,’ but because it’s on PBS and they’re speaking with English accents, it’s somehow

The One I Left BehindBy Jennifer McMahon (Wm. Morrow)Jennifer McMahon’s novels share a common link ― expert plotting complemented with a real feel for the complicated nature of relationships, feelings and what motivates a person’s actions.The Vermont-based author continues that high standard in her fifth novel. “The One I Left Behind” works well as a mesmerizing psychological thriller, as a look at how childhood trauma can forever scar an adult and as a testament to the power that the past and h

Nora Guthrie had put off reading her late father Woody Guthrie’s recently unearthed novel, “House of Earth,” even after she’d agreed for it to be published. Having devoted much of 2012 to preparing events and projects surrounding the centennial of the singer-songwriter-artist’s birth, she said, she wanted to read the book at her leisure, when it wouldn’t feel like “work.”So it wasn’t until last fall that she started in on the manuscript’s pages and soon reached the lengthy, graphic sex scene in

Revenge: Eleven Dark TalesBy Yoko Ogawa(Picador)Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow has some company in Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa, whose “Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales” is a storehouse of creepy and vicious behavior from otherwise normal-seeming people.In her books that have been translated into English so far, Ogawa has shown a propensity for characters in the grip of obsessions, be they the benign mathematical fixation of the brain-injured scholar in “The Professor and the

Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Writers on How and Why They Do What They DoEdited by Meredith Maran (Plume)Joan Didion had it right. In her 1976 essay “Why I Write,” originally published in the New York Times Book Review, she lays out the template in no uncertain terms: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjun

Reporter’s book chronicles history of Korean airports

English literature professor Kim Seong-kon, who is also director of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, has been elected president of the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (SUNY Buffalo) Alumni Association of Korea.Kim, who received his Ph.D. in English from the university, has been teaching at Seoul National University. He was appointed the director of LTI Korea in 2012. In the same year, he received the International Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mat

Nearly five months after he almost died in a plane crash on San Juan Island, author Richard Bach has returned to what he knows best ― the inspirational tale of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.The 76-year-old author and longtime pilot is recovering at his Orcas Island home after spending four months in a Seattle hospital with massive brain, chest and spine injuries. Bach says his recovery includes rediscovering simple pleasures, like walking and talking with ease and carving the Christmas turkey.He c

The LaughterhouseBy Paul Cleave(Atria)“The Laughterhouse,” the sixth novel by New Zealand crime writer Paul Cleave, offers a disgraced cop at economic loose ends, a multiple murderer who dispatches his victims in extravagant ways, and chapters narrated from inside the killer’s head.That’s not the freshest recipe in the crime fiction cookbook, but “The Laughterhouse” nonetheless held my attention. Its story is, a back-cover blurb tells me, one of revenge, survival, and impossible choices, and tha