“Becoming Wise” 　By Krista Tippett　The Penguin Press (288 pages, $28)　Most of us can only dream of the dinner parties Krista Tippett could put together. We’re lucky, then, that her new book is the next best thing to an invitation to sit down, make ourselves at home and prepare for a mind-expanding exploration of what it means to be human.　With “Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living,” Tippett expands on interviews that became fascinating fodder for her award-winning NPR pro

“Dear Mr. You” 　By Mary-Louise Parker　Scribner (228 pages, $25)　In the imaginative and evocative “Dear Mr. You,” sexy “Weeds” actress Mary-Louise Parker hints at her compelling life story through a series of love letters to key men in her life.　Each letter is a chapter, addressed to figures she mostly names only as Yacqui Indian Boy, Blue, Big Feet, Little Owl and the like. (You may find yourself googling her to try to suss out details.) As she explains in the titular first chapter, she’s writin

Acclaimed French writer discusses evolving themes in Korean literature

NEW YORK (AP) -- The fair-skinned man with the hoodie and dark ski cap sits on a bench outside McNally Jackson Books in downtown Manhattan, where neither patrons nor employees seem aware that he's the author of a work so in demand at the store that it’s often out of stock.　Known to his growing fan base as “Anonymous,” he has given us one of the more unusual self-published successes: “Diary of an Oxygen Thief,” a 147-page fictionalized memoir, or autobiographical novel, depending on how much of t

Lindy West is a defender of bodies: women’s bodies, fat bodies, every body’s right to exist in whatever way, shape or form, unjudged and unassailed. “Everyone has a body,” she says. “We haven’t developed brain-in-jar technology yet.” Her writing puts forth the unfortunately radical proposition that each person’s body is that person’s own business.“It is the thing that most belongs to them. It’s not yours,” she points out over sake bombs and edamame dip, pot stickers and ahi tacos. It’s the most

“Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War”　By Fred Kaplan　Simon & Schuster (352 pages, $28)　You’ve heard the complaining, from the White House on down, about the cyberattacks on our country. Well, yes, you guessed it: We started it.　That’s one of the central thrusts of Fred Kaplan’s “Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.” Because it pioneered computing, the U.S. intelligence agencies enjoyed decades of dominance over rivals, and even learned how to remotely wreak havoc on, say,

LONDON (AFP) - A rare first edition of British playwright William Shakespeare’s works from 1623 sold for 1.87 million pounds ($2.75 million) at Christie’s on Wednesday, the auction house said.A private U.S. collector bought the book as well as three subsequent Shakespeare collected works from 1632, 1664 and 1685 for a total of 2.48 million pounds.“The universality and timelessness of Shakespeare’s insight into human nature continues to engage and enthrall audiences the world over,” Margaret Ford

NEW YORK (AP) -- Helen Mirren’s latest role is audio only.　The award-winning British actress is narrating the recently rediscovered Beatrix Potter story “The Tale of Kitty-In-Boots,” Penguin Random House told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The hardcover and audio editions are scheduled for a Sept. 6 release. Actress Helen Mirren poses for photographers upon arrival at the screening of the film “La Fille Inconnue (The Unkown Girl)” at the 69th international film festival, Cannes, France, May 18

ABU DHABI (AFP) -- The Middle East’s poetry equivalent of “Pop Idol” is helping to keep alive an age-old tradition using bedouin dialect, which is barely understood outside the Arabian Gulf.　Apart from the glory, a Kuwaiti student took home five million dirhams ($1.4 million), the top prize in a television show followed by millions of poetry lovers across the region.　With his Nabati poem, Rajih al-Hamidani was crowned 2016 champion of “Million’s Poet,” staged in oil-rich Abu Dhabi for a seventh

Han Kang says she was never a best-selling writer until now

“A Country Road, A Tree: A Novel”　By Jo Baker　Knopf (304 pages, $26.95)　When war came to Europe in 1939, Samuel Beckett was a published but largely unknown and unread Irish writer working in the long shadow of James Joyce, for whom he’d served as a literary secretary in Paris while the great man was writing “Finnegans Wake.”　By war’s end six years later, Beckett was well on his way to becoming the markedly different writer who would shortly unveil “Waiting for Godot” and who is now justly rememb

“The Gene: An Intimate History” 　By Siddhartha Mukherjee　Scribner (592 pages, $30)　“Like Pythagoras’s triangle, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, like the Pyramids in Giza, like the image of a fragile blue planet seen from outer space, the double helix of DNA is an iconic image, etched permanently into human history and memory,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in “The Gene: An Intimate History,” a fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making

“The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich” 　By Lara Feigel　Bloomsbury (443 pages, $32)　It wasn’t just grunts and generals who crossed into Germany at the end of the Second World War. Along with Allied forces, a who’s who of writers, journalists, poets and filmmakers came to observe, report and reconstruct a shattered world.　What they saw shocked and bewildered them. Major cities -- Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne -- had been heavily bombed. The plight of ordina