Doris Lessing

Lately I've been wading into streams of mail from readers approaching death. Some are fighting it, some are afraid, some are ready to go. And then I heard from two readers with an update on Hedda Bolgar. I wrote about the Brentwood therapist three...

"'The Jungle Book' by Rudyard Kipling. I thought I was Mowgli, or I wanted to be Mowgli and have talking critters as friends. Absolutely, I wanted to escape the ghetto. I wanted to get out of poverty and live in some place magical. It seemed to me that if...

Esquire's 75 books by dudes for dudes is three years old, but Joyland created a list of 250 books for dudes by chicks....

The starry sky is regular subject, spiritual circumstance or actual setting of Philip Glass’ work. His latest opera, “Kepler,” given its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Wednesday night, is about the German astronomer who...

The Year of the Flood A Novel Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 434 pp., $26.95 Lady Oracle has been quiet the last six years. Yes, there have been half a dozen books, an opera even. But no novels, and it is in her novels that Margaret Atwood...

Alfred & Emily Doris Lessing HarperCollins: 276 pp., $25.95 Doris Lessing has never been one to shy from bold moves. She married early to escape her overbearing mother, then left her husband and two children, wedding a German Communist classed as an...

THE BEST WAY From LAX, KLM offers connecting service (change of planes) to Cardiff, Wales, about 47 miles from Hay on Wye. Restricted round-trip airfares start at $734. WHERE TO STAY The Swan at Hay, Church Street, Hay on Wye, Herefordshire; 011-44-...

If the selection of French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio as the 2008 Nobel literature laureate has anything to tell us, it's that Horace Engdahl means what he says. Last week, Engdahl, the Swedish Academy's permanent secretary, called American...

An 800-word Harry Potter prequel is one of 13 card-sized works to be sold at a charity auction in the British capital. Waterstone's Booksellers Ltd. says the cream-colored A5 papers -- each slightly bigger than a postcard -- were distributed to 13...