Houston Great Books

by Debbie Ford

When Truman Capote was asked about his research for In Cold Blood, his 1966 masterpiece about the murders of a Kansas farm family, …

I’ve seen the future of sex, and its name is Robot as in humanoids designed and programmed to satisfy our every psychological …

Laura Archera Huxley, the widow of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, who worked to preserve his legacy for nearly half a …

A book of fairy tales created, handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowling sold for nearly $4 million at auction Thursday.

If you read Stacy Cordery’s excellent new biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, you will gaze at Mount Rushmore and Theodore …

With targets as big as Mount Everest, reality TV, disaster movies and commercialization at the top of the world, you’d think …

The Book Review picks the best works from the last year.

A collection of notable comics is dominated by tales of woe: lonely girls, angst-ridden boys, death, drama, dysfunction.

With the Harry Potter series now completed, Scholastic is moving forward with what it hopes will be its follow-up blockbuster series.

Laura Archera Huxley was a writer who was best known for her memoir of her years with her husband, Aldous Huxley.

“I have said in some of my later atheist writings that I reached the conclusion about the nonexistence of God much too quickly . . .”

“The Children from Previous Relationships hung up their coats, and sat at their usual table on the public bar side of the pub as Septic Barry got the first round in from Mr Edwards, the landlord . . .”

“Henry James’s phrases and sentences magically coalesced in the listener’s ear into an image of a person, of a situation . . .”

“Overtreated,” by Shannon Brownlee, is the best description I have yet read of a huge economic problem that we know how to solve — but is so often misunderstood.

The idea behind BookCrossing.com is simple: You drop off a book in a public place, or pick up one someone else left behind.

This week: Will Self, author of “Psychogeography”; Liesl Schillinger on Yannick Murphy; David Kelly on Antony Flew and atheism; and Dwight Garner with best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is the host.

“London society was still somewhat amused by the gossip relating to the recently departed Dr. Johnson’s final exchange with the sour-natured Sir John Hawkins . . .”

At Harvard, some faculty and activists have been troubled that the university’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy helped revise the counterinsurgency field manual.

Joseph Weisberg has used some of what he learned while training to be a case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency to write his latest novel, “An Ordinary Spy.”

Sheldon M. Novick’s James led a life as emotionally, sexually and financially complex as those of the characters in his fiction.

A British philosopher, long an atheist, finds God.

Caryl Phillips experiments with three different voices in three grim tales of black men in Britain.

Will Self travels highways and byways — on foot — to reveal a different way of seeing.

A novel imagines the free-spirited life of Mata Hari, a courtesan, femme fatale and, possibly, spy.