CAMBRIDGE - If Canada is a big empty space in the minds of many Americans, its history is even blanker, especially in black-white relations. Now Lawrence Hill, a Canadian who has written extensively on the African-Canadian experience and whose family story spans the US-Canada border, has written a novel, based on real events, that draws together the tangled racial history ...

Best-selling writer Ira Levin - whose genre-hopping novels included the horror classic "Rosemary's Baby," the Nazi thriller "The Boys From Brazil," and the satirical fantasy "The Stepford Wives" - suffered a fatal heart attack in his Manhattan apartment Monday, said agent Phyllis Westberg. He was 78.

PROVINCETOWN - It was a spare epilogue to an expansive life writ large and long in books and in combative public appearances that for decades made him the best-known writer in America.

In her 11th medical thriller, "The Bone Garden," Maine physician Tess Gerritsen turns from the exploits of Boston detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles to give readers a historical thriller about a serial killer - known as the West End Reaper - loose on the streets of 1830s Boston.

You can never have enough books around the house. Especially used books. Disregard the unread stack on the nightstand; it's time to re-up once again at the 20th annual Cambridge Friends School Book Sale. Tonight the sale opens with a special event featuring readings from two writers who also happen to have children at the school: bestselling author of "Will ...

Fusiliers: The Saga of a British Redcoat Regiment in the American Revolution By Mark Urban Walker , 384 pp., illustrated $27.95

As a senior editor at Forbes magazine, Dan Lyons has made a career out of observing businesses, not running them. And as an old print hand, he was a little behind the curve when it came to new media.

Anger can be useful to a crime novelist. Without a good head of steam, there's no push toward resolution - no reason to resolve the crime. But in "Book of the Dead," Patricia Cornwell's 15th Dr. Kay Scarpetta novel, the anger goes too far.

You may know what you did yesterday, but do you know what your body did? Science writer Jennifer Ackerman probably does. She chronicles a day in the life of the human body, where everything from exercising to just waking up has a physiological effect, in her new book, "Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream." Ackerman explores the body like a travel ...

DEDHAM - Peter Reynolds had just finished reading from his book "The Dot" at a public event when a man approached him. Would Reynolds be interested in working on a children's story about the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway? Perhaps the story could have an iconic character that could be turned into a statue for the fledgling park, like the hugely ...

In 2004, Boston author Ben Mezrich had a bestseller with "Bringing Down the House," the true story of six kids from MIT who played the system in Vegas and made millions. He followed that up with "Ugly Americans," the true story of a bunch of Ivy League kids who played the Asian stock market and made millions. His latest, "Rigged," ...

A Dilbert comic strip struck a nerve in the 1990s when the evil boss proclaimed that employees were no longer the company's most valuable asset, but instead ranked ninth, behind money at No. 1 and carbon paper at No. 8.

No one is better qualified than John Richardson to explore the extraordinary life of Pablo Picasso, the single most influential artist of the 20th century. Richardson, born in England in 1924, studied art, but became a writer and ballet critic.

Sarah Addison Allen's first novel tosses magical realism and romance into a story about two sisters struggling to understand each other.

In the spring of 1943, after a series of calamitous defeats in the mountain passes of Tunisia, a bloodied Allied Army routed Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps and took control of North Africa. Still, it was hardly a knockout blow, and the Allies planned their next moves against the Axis.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist By Jonah Lehrer Houghton Mifflin, 242 pp., $24 That great artists have anticipated the discoveries of science is not news, but to hear that old news in an engaging form from a 25-year-old Rhodes scholar who has worked in both a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscience lab and a four-star restaurant kitchen is news indeed. Jonah Lehrer writes, ...

We didn't need Michael Moore to tell us that the American health-care system is broken; it's been front-page news for so long, we're getting - well - sick of hearing about it. Yes, Americans pay too much for care that is anything but caring, for technology that does little more than prolong our agony, for hospitals from which we emerge sicker than we entered.

Norman Mailer, the self-proclaimed heavyweight champion of postwar American letters, whose six decades in the public eye helped make him one of America's most acclaimed, controversial, and outrageous authors, died yesterday morning at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The cause of death was kidney failure. He was 84.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks An exploration of minds tortured and exalted by music (Knopf, $26).

TODAY: Archer Mayor reads from "Chat," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . The Somerville News Writers Festival, featuring Robert Pinsky, Tom Perrotta, Steve Almond, and many others, takes place at 7 p.m., at Dilboy VFW Hall, 371 Summer St., Somerville ($15).

Self-published books frequently attract nothing more than scorn from major publishers. Yet Brunonia Barry, who self-published "The Lace Reader," her debut supernatural thriller, has scored a deal worth about $2.5 million. William Morrow will publish "The Lace Reader" next August, followed by Barry's second novel, under the terms of the contract.

In his "History of the Peloponnesian War," Thucydides called freedom "the secret of happiness" and added that it requires "a brave heart" - by which he meant a willingness to fight for it.

The Willow Field By William Kittredge Vintage , 339 pp., $14.95 The number of novelists from Missoula, Mont., must be small compared with those from the East Coast, the South, and the Far West, but the prodigious gifts of one of them, William Kittredge, belie their underrepresentation. His poetic descriptions convey a vivid sense of the sights, sounds, and smells ...

Poet and Fulbright professor Kathleen Spivack celebrates her newest collection, "Moments of Past Happiness," at the Democracy Center today from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. Spivack isn't known only for her poetry. Her essay about losing love in Paris was recently featured in "The Best Women's Travel Writing 2007: True Stories From Around the World." The Democracy Center, 45 Mt. Auburn ...

Perrotta's novels are entertaining intersections of clashing characters. His social studies include the receding dreams of a wedding band guitarist in "The Wishbones," teenagers battling to adulthood in "Election," and young suburban couples mirroring "Madame Bovary" in "Little Children." In Perrotta's new novel, "The Abstinence Teacher," sex education is the touchstone for a small-town culture war. It connects Ruth, a ...

Now that you've recovered from the World Series and are busy rooting for the Patriots, Celtics, Bruins, and college teams, it's important to keep up your strength - and we're not talking chips and beer, no sirree. "Fan Fare," by cook and sports fan Debbie Moose, is collection of recipes from food-loving sports fans, and the selections would be tantalizing ...

What was it like to spend several years writing a book inside the mind of a devil?