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Award-winning Irish novelist John Banville has written 14 novels. He has been called "one of the finest living writers of English-language prose." But he recently has been writing mysteries under another name — Benjamin Black. His new noir novel is called The Silver Swan.

She's a spider's spider — sophisticated, pretty (by her own account), authoritarian — and she says something profound about love and commitment. Melissa Block looks at the heroine of Charlotte's Web.

In an interview with Terry Gross, taped in front of a live audience in New York City, the Daily Show host deconstructs his upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the National Mall and explains how The Daily Show comes up with material.

A long-awaited biography examines the life of Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and his influence during 34 years on the Supreme Court. Stephen Wermiel's interviews with Brennan during his lifetime reveal a man who defies the stereotype of the liberal justice trying to impose personal views on the law.

On the eve of Mozart's 251st birthday, The Kitchen Sisters take us to Vienna, to Mozart's Hidden Kitchen: "The Tables of New Crowned Hope." The festival honored the composer's free-thinking philosophy, innovation and radical music.

Even after the extensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans journalist Jason Berry say there's much to be learned from new books on the storm: about global warming, how cities live or die, the science of levees and stunning human dramas.

Best-selling mystery novelist Michael Connelly roams the streets of Los Angeles in search of a good story. He doesn't have to look far to find real-life inspiration for his Harry Bosch detective series among the city's people and places.

Are all blogs just scattered rantings and mundane diaries? Reporter and critic Sarah Boxer trawled the Web for solid examples of blog writing and assembled them in a book, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web.

Political satirist Christopher Buckley's novel Boomsday features a young blogger who suggests the U.S. government might offer baby boomers tax incentives to kill themselves before retirement age.

In 2008, historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive motor-neuron disease. For the past several months, Judt has been writing a series of essays for The New York Review of Books, charting life in what he calls a "progressive imprisonment without parole."