Even before the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, pirates were romantic.Now, in “The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook” Jason Heller brings you a guide to all things (Disney) pirate.Piracy has been with us from the beginning of time. Julius Caesar was taken prisoner, ransomed and later crucified his capturers. The infamous Blackbeard looted ships in the eighteenth century. There was little attra

Not even changing the cockroach into a kitten can help the latest literary mash-up ― “The Meowmorphosis”Coleridge Cook takes a well-written stab at Franz Kafka’s depressing novella “The Metamorphosis” and turns it into ... well, a slightly less gloomy tale. Where Kafka turned his lead character, Gregor Samsa, into a beetle, Cook transforms him into an adorable fluffy kitten.Kafka was an early twen

SEATTLE ― The weeks leading up to a book’s publication can be hard on an author. Will the books get to the booksellers? Will the cover come out right-side-up? Will people buy it? Will they read it? Will they like it?Erik Larson is as well-known and well-read as any Seattle author ― his 2003 book, “The Devil in the White City,” the story of a serial murderer who preyed on the margins of the 1893 Ch

Michelin Guide, an internationally renowned travel guide, will release its Green Guide Korea edition in French on May 17, the Korea Tourism Organization said Monday.The KTO reached an agreement with Michelin Guide in April last year to publish the Korea edition. A group of reporters collected information on major tourist sites, cultural and historical sites, accommodation and restaurants in Korea

WILLOW GROVE, Pennsylvania (AP) ― Fans of comic books basked in a bounty of free issues as retailers from Los Angeles to London handed out thousands upon thousands of free copies Saturday for the 10th annual Free Comic Book Day.Some stores opened early while others arranged for artists and writers, including top names like DC Comics’ chief creative officer, Geoff Johns, Marvel writer Jonathan Hick

Review: Under the spell of ‘The Sandalwood Tree’“The Sandalwood Tree”  (Atria Books),  by Elle NewmarkIf you like your love stories sweeping and wrapped in history, “The Sandalwood Tree” by Elle Newmark has it all.The narrative switches between India in two generations, the mid-19th century and post-World War II. The 1947 narrator is Evie, an American whose marriage is on the rocks after her husba

I’ve outgrown J.D. Salinger, and I don’t know where that leaves me.I was 10 when my father handed me “The Catcher in the Rye,” and I found not just a voice for all the wild despair and sudden inexplicable elation of adolescence but an acknowledgement that these feelings did not occur in a vacuum. Salinger reached into the “vale of tears” catechism of my Irish Catholic upbringing and lifted me out

LOS ANGELES ― Shortly before Daniel Hernandez moved from Los Angeles to Mexico to write a book about its roiling capital, a friend gave him an order. “I don’t want to see you back from Mexico City until it’s physically altered you, until you are different,” Hernandez was told.The Western Hemisphere’s largest metropolitan area, with about 22 million people, has its existential challenges: toxic air

Book looks at Rivera and rest of Yankees bullpenBullpen Diaries: Mariano Rivera, Bronx Dreams, Pinstripe Legends, and the Future of the New York Yankees by Charley Rosen(Harper, $25.99)Forgive New York Yankees fans if they get nervous when one of the team’s relievers takes the mound. The 41-year-old lights-out closer, Mariano Rivera, appears to defy time with every cutter he throws for a strike. F

“The Uncoupling” is best-selling author Meg Wolitzer’s ninth novel, in which she brings her signature brand of humor and insight to the topic of the changing nature of female desire over time.When a new drama teacher in a suburban high school puts on a production of “Lysistrata” (the classic Aristophanes play in which the women of Greece go on a sex strike against men until a war ends), the women

Ever since Vanity Fair put her on its January 2010 cover in what looked like a Wonder Woman costume, Tina Fey has seemed in danger of falling for the very canard she has spent a career satirizing: that a woman can “have it all” if she’s willing to lose 20 pounds, show her breasts and regularly remind everyone that, although she writes and stars in an Emmy-winning TV show, she is still essentially

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) ― Book dealer Ken Sanders has seen a lot of nothing in his decades appraising “rare” finds pulled from attics and basements, storage sheds and closets.Sanders, who occasionally appraises items for PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, often employs the “fine art of letting people down gently.”But on a recent Saturday while volunteering at a fundraiser for the small town museum in Sandy, Uta

Styron’s youngest daughter pens revealing memoirReading My Father: A MemoirBy Alexandra Styron(Scribner, $25)A decade after the publication of his last, lavishly acclaimed novel, “Sophie’s Choice,” William Styron wrote about his epic struggle with incapacitating depression.It was, as his youngest daughter, Alexandra, writes in a compelling new memoir, before Kay Jamison, Andrew Sullivan or other f