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World War II was over, but as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, a new evil lurked in the land.
No one doubts she's hard-driving. But she has never learned to drive, Barbara Walters reveals in her new memoir, "Audition."
Chris Farley was a corpulent "Saturday Night Live" veteran like John Belushi. He died of a drug overdose like John Belushi (at the same age, no less).
When Julie Andrews was 14, her mother took her to a party at the home of a man in a nearby town. At her mother's bidding, the girl sang a song for the guests and sat down for a talk with the host, who was "tall and fleshly handsome."
Cartoonist Ted Key, whose comic strip "Hazel" about a bossy maid went from magazine page to TV screen, has died. He was 95.
The nickname was meant as a joke, a little needle from Marvel Comics mainstay Stan Lee to artist Jack Kirby.
After three decades of keeping mum, Barbara Walters is disclosing a past affair with married U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, whom she remembers as "exciting" and "brilliant."
Muhammad Ali, shirtless in white satin boxing shorts and pierced with six arrows, poses as St. Sebastian, a martyr to his faith. The April 1968 Esquire magazine cover was one of the most iconic images of the decade, tying together the incendiary issues of the Vietnam War, race and religion.
Film director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts the Bible by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.
An actress and writer who said she was Norman Mailer's former longtime mistress has sold papers that include lengthy accounts of their sex life and hand-edited drafts of her writing to Harvard University, Mailer's alma mater.
World War II was over, but as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s, a new evil lurked in the land.
No one doubts she's hard-driving. But she has never learned to drive, Barbara Walters reveals in her new memoir, "Audition."
Chris Farley was a corpulent "Saturday Night Live" veteran like John Belushi. He died of a drug overdose like John Belushi (at the same age, no less).
When Julie Andrews was 14, her mother took her to a party at the home of a man in a nearby town. At her mother's bidding, the girl sang a song for the guests and sat down for a talk with the host, who was "tall and fleshly handsome."
Cartoonist Ted Key, whose comic strip "Hazel" about a bossy maid went from magazine page to TV screen, has died. He was 95.
The nickname was meant as a joke, a little needle from Marvel Comics mainstay Stan Lee to artist Jack Kirby.
After three decades of keeping mum, Barbara Walters is disclosing a past affair with married U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, whom she remembers as "exciting" and "brilliant."
Muhammad Ali, shirtless in white satin boxing shorts and pierced with six arrows, poses as St. Sebastian, a martyr to his faith. The April 1968 Esquire magazine cover was one of the most iconic images of the decade, tying together the incendiary issues of the Vietnam War, race and religion.
Film director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts the Bible by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary.
An actress and writer who said she was Norman Mailer's former longtime mistress has sold papers that include lengthy accounts of their sex life and hand-edited drafts of her writing to Harvard University, Mailer's alma mater.
For a time, "Harry Potter" superfan Steven Vander Ark seemed to be living a geeky dream.
David Shields was suffering from a bad back. And then came the attacks of September 11, 2001.
A Harry Potter fan who sought to publish an encyclopedic guide to the wildly popular fantasy novels broke down and cried on the witness stand Tuesday as he faced off in court against his idol J.K. Rowling.
Jack Handey thinks dinosaurs are overrated.
Everybody wants to leave their mark. Nowadays, that means everybody is writing a memoir.
Best-selling author J.K. Rowling said Monday that her efforts to halt a publisher's "Harry Potter" encyclopedia have been crushing her creativity.
It turns out that James Bond creator Ian Fleming got a little help from an unexpected source -- a real-life Miss Moneypenny to whom he turned for advice on plot points and character development.
You need a big block of time, and space, to say goodbye to Norman Mailer.
Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock 'n' roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall.
A fire on Saturday caused about $20,000 in damage to the home of Tom Clancy, a best-selling author of political thrillers, authorities said.
J.K. Rowling has retired Harry Potter, but the fictional boy wizard lives in on college classes across the country where the children's books are embraced as literary and academic texts.
British writer and self-styled dandy Sebastian Horsley was denied entry to the United States after arriving to promote his memoir of sex, drugs and flamboyant fashion.
Even in death Arthur C. Clarke would not compromise his vision.
Author Arthur C. Clarke, whose science fiction and non-fiction works ranged from the script for "2001: A Space Odyssey" to an early proposal for communications satellites, has died at age 90, associates have said.
Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.
Stories from the island of Hispaniola were winners Thursday night at the National Book Critics Circle awards: Dominican-American Junot Diaz took the fiction prize for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," and Haitian Edwidge Danticat was cited in autobiography for "Brother, I'm Dying."
Two years after the fall of James Frey, a publisher has again been conned by a memoirist with a life that proved too bad to be true.
A memoir by a white woman who claimed she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for a gang in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood has turned out to be pure fiction, a newspaper report says.
A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling "memoir" depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said Friday.
As the creator of the Harry Potter books sees it, her kindness to fans might come back to haunt her.
The biggest acting role of Lily Rabe's life ended with an abrupt thud. During a rehearsal for her role as Babe in a revival of Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart," a piece of the set fell on her during a pivotal, life-or-death scene.
Even for an Oprah Winfrey book pick, "A New Earth" has been a sensation.
A legal battle over prized documents purportedly belonging to "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell has blown over, but the final resting place of the disputed papers is still a secret.
At age 77, author Chinua Achebe is living in grace and in exile, housed in a cottage built just for him on the campus of Bard College, lonely for his native Nigeria and the people for whom his stories have been written.
Some things John Grisham knows: He got 15 rejections before his first book, "A Time to Kill," was published. He made $9 million last year. He's not James Joyce or William Faulkner. He's an entertainer.
It turns out you can't keep a good man down -- or even dead and buried -- when he wears a red, white and blue uniform and calls himself Captain America.
Ishmael Beah, author of a best-selling memoir about his time as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, disputes newspaper reports that he had exaggerated his war service, telling The Associated Press on Wednesday that he will "stand by" what he wrote.
Listening to writer Brian K. Vaughan summarize the plot of his comic book, "Y: The Last Man," makes it sound like just another pulp title.
Margaret Truman, the only child of former President Harry S. Truman who became a concert singer, actress, radio and TV personality and mystery writer, died Tuesday. She was 83.
Nobody could have seen this celebrity breakup coming: After more than 20 years of marriage, Spider-Man and Mary Jane are kaput.
A biography and 4-year-old video of Tom Cruise are calling attention to the actor's belief in Scientology.
A Baltimore librarian's classroom project is now part of publishing history. "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village," first conceived a decade ago by Laura Amy Schlitz, is this year's winner of the John Newbery Medal for best children's book.
Joyce Carol Oates led a field of National Book Critics Circle finalists announced Saturday, with nominations in both fiction and autobiography categories.
A popular romance novelist who's been criticized for allegedly lifting material has angered the biggest name in the genre: Nora Roberts.
Years ago, a journalist I knew was pushing a studio publicist for access to Tom Cruise. The writer insisted on spending two days with Cruise, arguing, "If I have enough time, I know I can crack him."
An author who claims Jerry Seinfeld's wife plagiarized her cookbook sued the famous couple on Monday, finding no humor when the comedian compared the three-name author to the three-name killers of John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr.
Tom Wolfe is working on a new novel and will release it through a new publisher, ending a 40-year run with Farrar, Straus & Giroux and signing with Little, Brown and Co.
A former home of poet Robert Frost has been vandalized, with intruders destroying dozens of items and setting fire to furniture in what police say was an underage drinking party.
For those rock 'n' roll fans on your gift list this holiday season, there are plenty of new offerings to keep their heads bopping along happily into the new year.
What William Goldman once said about Hollywood -- "Nobody knows anything" -- can easily describe the decisions made by children's book publishers.
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke listed three wishes on his 90th birthday: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings.
A book of fairy tales created, handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowling sold for nearly $4 million at auction Thursday.
Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has admitted that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer's disease -- but says he plans to continue writing his multi-million selling Discworld books.
Brandon Sanderson, author of the fantasy "Mistborn" series, will finish Robert Jordan's final novel.
Hillary Clinton had a question when Tom Brokaw told her he was working on a book on the 1960s.
The hard-drinking, foul-mouthed writer Charles Bukowski once described himself as a guy who wouldn't walk away from a brawl.
The conception of Adolf Hitler was never going to make for easy reading. But the late Norman Mailer's explicit rendition of the incestuous encounter between the genocidal German dictator's parents has won the writer one of the world's most dubious literary prizes.
Bookstores are lined with the works of novelists who've never seen their creations make it to the silver screen -- or who've been burned when they do.
An Iranian government decision to forbid the second printing of a Persian translation of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel has spurred interest in the book, booksellers said Saturday.
When the world first met Easy Rawlins, he was 28. It was post-World War II Los Angeles -- a city full of opportunity and without a long history -- not a bad place to be for a smart, confident black man. Fired from his job, Easy was in need of fast cash to pay his mortgage. So he agreed to find a missing blonde, and his adventures began.
With the United States fighting an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, stories of espionage and critiques of foreign policy were winners at the 58th annual National Book Awards.
Oprah Winfrey went for the big time Wednesday with her latest book club pick, choosing Ken Follett's 973-page "The Pillars of the Earth," an announcement that will likely mean hundreds of thousands more sales for an author with a huge, international following.
Best-selling writer Ira Levin, whose novels included the horror classic "Rosemary's Baby," the Nazi thriller "The Boys From Brazil" and the satirical fantasy "The Stepford Wives," has died. He was 78.
Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared.
His friends all tell similar stories: Norman Mailer at a dinner party, awards ceremony or afternoon gathering, hobbling on canes up or down a few steps or a flight of stairs, short of breath, as if getting from one place to another was a struggle even greater than finding the right word to finish a paragraph.
Norman Mailer, the outspoken author whose prize-winning works made him a towering figure on the American literary stage for more than 50 years, is dead. He was 84.
Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur, died of renal failure early Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.
Millions of readers who bought James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" were sold something less than the truth.
J.K. Rowling has completed her first book since concluding the tale of teen wizard Harry Potter -- an illustrated collection of magical fairy stories titled "The Tales of Beedle the Bard."
The trend seems as plain as the nose on your child's face, or an arrow through your head. There's Madonna, Billy Crystal and Jamie Lee Curtis. And Jerry Seinfeld. And John Lithgow. And Katie Couric.
Jerry Seinfeld says his wife isn't guilty of "vegetable plagiarism."
The writing of Richard Russo's new novel didn't start out well.
Rhett Butler, the fictional Southern charmer who walked out of Scarlett O'Hara's life in "Gone With the Wind," returns to Georgia next weekend -- on a book tour of sorts.
Garrison Keillor has gotten a restraining order against a Georgia woman he claims has made telephone calls and sent him explicit e-mails and disturbing gifts, including a petrified alligator foot and dead beetles.
With author J.K. Rowling's revelation that master wizard Albus Dumbledore is gay, some passages about the Hogwarts headmaster and rival wizard Gellert Grindelwald have taken on a new and clearer meaning.
Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay.
Norman Mailer is recovering in a hospital after surgery to remove scar tissue around his lung, his daughter-in-law said Wednesday.
Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize Tuesday for "The Gathering," an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family.
David Michaelis' new biography of Charles M. Schulz explores the man behind "Peanuts," the comic strip that has delighted readers for decades. CNN.com appealed to fans out there to say what Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown meant to them.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling made a rare U.S. appearance, reading at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood in front of scores of wand-clutching would-be wizards and witches.
It wasn't a reckless obsession with liquor, drugs and gunplay that made the late Hunter S. Thompson the undisputed king of Gonzo journalism, his wife says. Instead, it was old-fashioned principles such as working hard and telling the truth, enlivened by the glee Thompson took from learning and from being right.
Oprah Winfrey has picked "Love in the Time of Cholera," the epic love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as her next book club selection.
Beyond its cluster of office towers, Tulsa is a city built close to the ground, a broad clash of neighborhoods you can tell apart by how the grass grows, bright and trim as a putting green in the richer sections, pale and shaggy in the poorer spots.
Philip Roth says he's done with Nathan Zuckerman. But is Nathan done with Philip Roth?
Alan Alda almost died in 2003. He was in a remote area of Chile, doing an episode of "Scientific American Frontiers," and he developed an intestinal obstruction that came within hours of killing him. It was his good fortune that he survived the whole ordeal.
With O.J. Simpson in jail on charges of robbery and other felonies, the best-selling book about his alleged murder confession is getting a second printing.
Author Robert Jordan, whose "Wheel of Time" series of fantasy novels sold millions of copies, has died of a rare blood disease, his aide said Monday. He was 58.
It's an illusion, William Gibson says. A trick. Fiction is a construct that plays with your mind, creating a world within.
Author Madeleine L'Engle, whose novel "A Wrinkle in Time" has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s, has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 88.
Manya Callahan, manager of the Barnes & Noble Downtown store, sees them all the time, young and old, looking for books by Lowell's most famous citizen.
This fall's most star-studded book tour will feature Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Doris Kearns Goodwin and others reading coast to coast on behalf of an award-winning author they dearly wish could have discussed his work himself: David Halberstam.
Only one person on the planet has covered every manned launch out of Cape Canaveral and now, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of spaceflight, he's written a book about it.
Denise Jackson knew that her marriage to Alan Jackson wasn't perfect. She was too needy and insecure in the relationship, and he was on the road a lot, becoming one of country's biggest superstars.
A family that claimed they were defamed in the best-selling book "Running with Scissors" has settled a lawsuit against the writer and his publisher.
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