When readers follow Bill Bryson on a literary amble, they never know exactly where they might end up ― just that they’ll probably be happy to have tagged along.His past journeys, along the Appalachian Trail (1998’s “A Walk in the Woods”), into the life of Shakespeare (2007’s “Shakespeare: The World as Stage”) and the rest of the universe (2003’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”), to name a few, put him in rarified territory. He’s popular enough to automatically appear on best-seller lists,

It’s been 17 years since “Bridget Jones’s Diary” first hit the scene, turning freelance journalist Helen Fielding into a best-selling author and screenwriter. Her latest installment, “Mad About the Boy,” follows Bridget, now 51, as she copes with the loss of her beloved Mark Darcy while trying to raise their children. We talked with Fielding over the phone about how it feels to bring Bridget back into the public eye (while taking lots of heat from those Colin Firth fans!).The following is an edi

You may think writing poetry is all about gazing at the stars in the sky and the bluebells in the fields, then being struck by divine inspiration. But if you ask Billy Collins, he’ll tell you the process is more like a Wallace and Gromit cartoon.“There’s a great one where the dog is on top of a locomotive,” says the two-term U.S. poet laureate. “He’s got a box full of track, and he’s frenetically laying down track in front of the train. That’s a good metaphor for writing a poem.”Collins, 72, has

The Daylight GateBy Jeanette Winterson(Grove) Jeanette Winterson’s new novel is a strange and spare piece of horror writing about witch trials that arrives on these shores just in time for Halloween.“The Daylight Gate” is based on a real-life story of the Pendle Witches, men and women charged in 1612 with using their alleged craft to murder innocents in Lancashire in northwest England. Winterson re-creates the turbulent times that fed the anti-witch hysteria. King James, obsessed with the idea o

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling GiantsBy Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Co.)The dose makes the poison, as Paracelsus, the father of toxicology, is supposed to have said. A glass of water is good for you; an ocean’s worth can be fatal.That’s the underlying message of Malcolm Gladwell’s new exercise in raconteurship, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.” The book is ostensibly about how underdogs can win, but for great stretche

KLTI Korea-Dalkey Archive Press joint project includes work from contemporary, colonial and post-colonial periods

Why was Marie Colvin, who became one of Britain’s most celebrated war correspondents, in Homs, Syria, in February 2012? One thing’s for sure: She had not been invited. After the Syrian government closed its borders to journalists, intrepid reporters like Colvin and her colleague from Britain’s Sunday Times, photographer Paul Conroy, were forced to take extreme measures to cover the nation’s civil war.Colvin and Conroy’s epic journey from Beirut, involved minivans, pickup trucks, motorbikes, hear

The Edge of NormalBy Carla Norton(Minotaur)Carla Norton’s enthralling “The Edge of Normal,” about a young woman rebuilding her life after being held by a kidnapper for years, offers more than a ripped-from-the- headlines pastiche.This fiction debut delivers an emotional story of a woman fighting to regain her sense of self, to reach, at least, an edge of normal without falling. Reeve LeClaire, who was kidnaped when she was 12 and held for four years, doesn‘t want people to see her only as a vict

Quiet DellBy Jayne Anne Phillips (Scribner)Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in West Virginia hearing about the infamous Quiet Dell murders of 1931, real-life killings of a widow and her three children at the hands of a con man she met through a lonely hearts club.Phillips learned about the grisly case from an unlikely source: her mother, who remembered as a child walking past the “murder garage” where Asta Eicher and her children ― 14, 12 and 9 ― died, the road nearby lined with cars of souvenir-seek

It is more difficult to draw an image clearly on another image than to do so on blank paper. Likewise, once a space or region has been ill-developed, it is more difficult to turn it back to a well developed space than to develop a space from ground zero.　It is a “counterattack of space,” says Professor Lim Hyung-baek of Sungkyul University in his recent book, “The Formation and Change of Spatial Structure of Land in Korea” (Hanul Publishing Co.).　The author, who is on the editorial staff of the

Now concluding his own trilogy, J.W. Rinzler provides the definitive history at the chronologically last movie in the “Star Wars” saga in “The Making of ‘Star Wars’: Return of the Jedi.”While “Jedi” is the final chapter in the six movies that make up “Star Wars,” it was actually released third, back in 1983, behind “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.”“The Making of” shows that even getting it produced wasn’t a sure thing. Creator George Lucas and his team discussed making “Jedi” as they we

A House in the SkyBy Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett (Scribner)“Somalia was hardly a starter war zone,” concedes Amanda Lindhout, but that didn’t stop the freelance journalist from flying into this anarchic East African country in August 2008. Accompanying the 27-year-old Canadian novice ― who planned to file dispatches for the Red Deer Advocate, circulation 13,000 ― was a 37-year-old photographer from Australia, Nigel Brennan.“I’d like to say that I hesitated before heading into Somalia, but I

She has had an enjoyable string of best-sellers. Remember “Getting to Happy,” “Waiting to Exhale” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”? Remember “Mama”? Well, you won’t likely forget Terry McMillan’s “Who Asked You?” either.In its 383 pages, McMillan introduces us to Betty Jean Butler, the rock of an African-American family weighed down by race, gender issues, economic challenges and, yes, family secrets.Recently, she took some questions:Q: It’s been three years since your last book. Why did you

FRANKFURT (AFP) ― Organizers of the world’s biggest book fair warned Tuesday against the domination of Internet giants as the publishing world grapples to blend old and new forms of reading.American giants Amazon, Apple and Google ― whose entry into the world of online sales and digital books is threatening the traditional publishing industry ― are “logistics magicians but are not publishers,” said Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair.“There’s no passion there,” he told reporters as