Cormac McCarthy

The house Antonya Nelson shares with her husband, writer Robert Boswell, and their two grown children, Noah, 18, and Jade, 21, is doeskin adobe, built in 1910, surrounded by dusty, shaded sage plants. Inside, there is color everywhere: flowers, pottery,...

Fiction 1. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer ($10.99) 2. The Shack by William P. Young ($14.99) 3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz ($14) 4. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer ($10.99) 5. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd ($15) 6. The...

West Texas is a desolate place that can't support much in the way of trees or people. And those who live there learn to look out for one another — or they did, in an earlier age. But that is changing. Drug- and immigrant-smuggling have raised the...

AS "No Country for Old Men" star Josh Brolin said in accepting the Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble cast, "The Coen brothers are freaky little people, you know, and we did a freaky little movie." Indeed, sitting down with the notoriously press-shy,...

Shiver me timbers R.L. Stine, author of the beloved "Goosebumps" series of creepy, crawly stories, is heading to "HorrorLand." The ghoulish theme park will be the springboard for 12 new tales, with Scholastic Books planning to release the first two...

Almost 50 years ago, in 1959, Philip Roth published "Goodbye, Columbus," a coming-of-age love story that was short, sharp, tender and pitch-perfect, and won the National Book Award. Few writers have launched a career so auspiciously. Roth, of course, went...

By Ed Park * To take a page from last month's column: We learn from John Crowley's "Endless Things," the final book of his "Aegypt" cycle, that "Coleridge had written . . . that 'the common end of all narrative, nay of all poems, is to convert a...

With the possible exception of certain underwater adventures and outer-space stories, pretty much every movie relies on architectural symbolism, finding in the house where the hero lives, the saloon he drinks in or the city streets he caroms through in...

This year's Oscar-nominated movies, especially larger-than-life epics such as "Atonement" and "There Will Be Blood," take you there -- but exactly where? Like actors' doubles, films often are shot in breathtaking locations that are stand-ins for the...

A famous dead white male, Horace Walpole, once observed, "Life is a comedy for those who think . . . and a tragedy for those who feel." Since they first hit the big screen big-time two decades ago with the neo-noir thriller "Blood Simple," Ethan and Joel...

"No Country for Old Men," Joel and Ethan Coen's visceral crime thriller based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, was named best film of 2007 Wednesday by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. George Clooney was named best actor for his role as a...

For all the fishtail evening gowns, famous faces and European-accented acceptance speeches, it was an intimate evening at the Kodak. "The fight is over," host Jon Stewart said, referring to the recently settled writers strike that threatened to derail the...