Search results for

John Ridley's comic-book series The American Way has just been collected into a graphic novel; it takes place in 1961, when the government has created a team of super-heroes to battle foreign super-villains. But it's all just a show created to pacify the public. Ridley previously wrote the screenplay for Three Kings and the novel A Conversation with the Mann.

In 1957, French-Algerian writer Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his short story collection Exile and the Kingdom was first published in French. The first English translations of the stories were not well received by critics. Fifty years later, Carol Cosman has newly translated the book.

Elise Blackwell takes a gamble with her fine new novel, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish. Blackwell's writing is lovely, but flashbacks in the plot and an incomplete inclusion of Hurricane Katrina get in her way.

Christopher Janney, an architect and jazz musician, combines both passions in "sound sculptures." His interactive sound and light installations are found in airports in Dallas, Miami and Sacramento — and soon at Logan in Boston.

Celebrity couple Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance have a new book out about relationships. It's titled Friends: A Love Story.

Underground comic book artist Robert Crumb created ZAP COMIX and is the artist behind such 1960s and 1970s icons as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and Keep-on-Truckin. His wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb, was one of the earliest underground female cartoonists. Her new book, Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, chronicles her life and career. Robert's new book is The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb.

Hisham Nitar's semi-autobiographical debut novel In the Country of Men was short-listed for the 2006 Mann Booker Prize. Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli, Libya, and later in Cairo, Egypt. He has lived in Great Britain since 1986. Matar's father, a critic of the Libyan regime, was arrested in 1990. Matar has been unable to find out what happened to him.

In April 1975, Bich Minh Nguyen and her family fled Saigon and settled in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, captures what it was like to be Vietnamese in the conservative, largely white town — and the role that food played in her assimilation.

On the second anniversary of the playwright's death, Michele Norris talks to two actors from the Broadway production of his final play, Radio Golf.

Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report talks about his book I Am America (And So Can You!). Colbert targets race, religion, sports and the American family as well as more mundane topics like breakfast cereal and the Hollywood blacklist.