Lynn Neary archive

November 19, 2009 The 60th annual National Book Awards were handed out Wednesday night in New York. Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize. T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, was the nonfiction winner, and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won for poetry.

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November 17, 2009 The history of literature is filled with authors who also performed surgery or scribbled prescriptions. Lynn Neary speaks with two doctors who are also fiction writers — Abraham Verghese and Terrence Holt — about the link between medicine and writing literature.

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November 9, 2009 Writer Barbara Kingsolver is fascinated by the tension inherent in living on the border between two cultures. Her latest novel, The Lacuna, tells the story of a young man born of a Mexican mother and an American father.

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October 20, 2009 The book industry is reeling as the price of some of its hottest books drops to a new low at some online stores. The price war took off last week when Walmart cut its price for online pre-orders of 10 upcoming best-sellers to $10. Amazon countered with a similar discount of $9, which Wal-Mart then took down to $8.99. Now, Target is entering the fray.

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October 16, 2009 Though her singing voice was irreparably damaged in 1997, Julie Andrews' innate musicality is irrepressible. Her new book, a collection of poems, songs and lullabies, features an accompanying CD in which Andrews reads some of the verses that played an important role in her family.

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October 2, 2009 The young boy in Pete Dexter's new novel, Spooner, bears a striking resemblance to the author himself. But Dexter insists that he hasn't written a memoir, only a novel with "a lot happier ending than life was."

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October 2, 2009 In the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne's classic tales of Winnie the Pooh, author David Benedictus treads gently on the sacred woods of the original.

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September 18, 2009 People in the publishing business described this week as a trifecta: It began with the release on Monday of the new Ted Kennedy autobiography and ends Friday with Oprah's announcement of her latest book club pick. In between, Dan Brown's new book The Lost Symbol hit the stores.

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September 1, 2009 In her trilogy-in-progress — first The Hunger Games and now Catching Fire — Suzanne Collins blends elements of reality TV with themes from Greek mythology. The resulting books can be shocking — and enthralling.

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August 4, 2009 Authors struggling to hit it big on the publishing scene find that writing other people's books can open the door to financial freedom.

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July 31, 2009 Even in some of its more dicey neighborhoods, St. Paul, Minn., has the old-fashioned American look of an Edward Hopper painting. It's not particularly threatening looking, but for crime writer John Sandford, this is the territory of tough thugs.

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