Japanese writer Haruki Murakami is the most-read foreign novelist in South Korea, according to a recent poll. Reflecting the Murakami boom here, Korea Gallup said that 24 percent of 1,230 people aged 19 and over surveyed said they had read a book by the popular Japanese author.Forty-five percent of the respondents said they were aware of Murakami, but had not read any of his novels. Another 31 percent said they did not know who he was.The Japanese novelist was more popular with female readers, w

Like a contemporary Jane Austen, Adelle Waldman unpacks every nuance of modern mating mores in her debut novel, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” (Henry Holt). The setting is literary Brooklyn, and her protagonist is Nate Piven, whose think-pieces for highbrow magazines and six-figure book contract make him a fellow to watch on the scene. These credentials, along with the crimson T-shirt peeking out of his unbuttoned Oxford to reveal the A-R-V of Harvard, are finally getting him some chicks.Eac

DETROIT (AP) ― Acclaimed crime novelist Elmore Leonard is recovering at a U.S. hospital following a stroke last week.Leonard’s longtime researcher, Gregg Sutter, said Tuesday that family members are guardedly optimistic about the 87-year-old’s condition.Leonard has written 45 Westerns, crime novels and mysteries. Sutter says Leonard has been at work on No. 46.Many of his books ― notably “Out of Sight,” “Get Shorty” and “Be Cool” ― have become films. “Life of Crime,” which is based on Leonard’s “

MARION, Massachusetts (AP) ― An original manuscript of a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe has sold for $300,000 at an auction in Massachusetts.The Standard Times of New Bedford reports that the handwritten poem with Poe’s signature was purchased Saturday in Marion, about 50 miles south of Boston, by a collector who was given 10 days to verify its authenticity.The item had been owned by a Rhode Island family since the 1920s.The poem, “The Conqueror Worm,’’ is believed to have been written in the 1

For a small book, Yoko Ono’s new collection of instructions, “Acorn” (O/R Books), has been in the works for a long time: almost half a century.“It’s been nearly 50 years since my book of conceptual instructions, ‘Grapefruit,’ was first published,” the 80-year-old avant-garde icon writes in a brief introduction to the project. “Some years ago, I picked up from where I left off, and wrote ‘Acorn’ for a website event. Now it’s being published in book form. I’m riding a time machine that’s going bac

HONG KONG (AFP) ― The slow death of handwriting might be a boon for email-reading intelligence agencies but not for biographers, says the man entrusted by Queen Elizabeth II to write the biography of her mother.Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, journalist and broadcaster William Shawcross has written provocatively on an array of subjects including Cambodia, the fall of the Shah of Iran, Rupert Murdoch, the Iraq war and justice in the post 9/11 world.Most recently Shawcross, 67, wrote the official