North Bingham County District Library

It took over five years for Nathaniel Rich to finish his first novel — maybe because he was writing The Mayor's Tongue secretly, first as a college student, and then while writing film criticism during the day.

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Children's author Jon Scieszka has written two dozen fantastical books, including The Stinky Cheese Man and the Time Warp Trio series, but his most recent work is an autobiography geared toward children.

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Whatever happened to those Harry Potter-obsessed 11- and 12-year-olds who devoured the books and went everywhere dressed as Harry and Hermione? They're in college now, and instead of the usual campus sports, you'll find some of them running around on brooms, chasing the snitch.

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Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru has extensively covered the "parallel army" of private security contractors. His book Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting In Iraq, details the tens of thousands of "mercs" who arrived in Iraq in the absence of sufficient levels of U.S. troops.

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If reading a story is — as John Gardner said — like falling into a vivid and continuous waking dream, then is giving a book like giving someone a dream? Reviewer Alan Cheuse puzzles over the perfect books for your loved ones this year.

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Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country, a revision of a trilogy of novels from the 1990s, won the National Book Award for fiction Wednesday night in New York. Annette Gordon-Reed won the nonfiction award for The Hemingses of Monticello, about Thomas Jefferson's hidden slave family.

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The teen vampire movie Twilight opens in theaters Friday. The movie follows the best-selling series of romance-thriller novels, set in the small and rainy hamlet of Forks on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Despite its remoteness, the town has become a pilgrimage destination for readers from around the world.

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A photographer and a comedy writer went through over 50,000 head shots and picked out those that "took our breath away." The book that resulted is a bizarre tutorial in the art of getting noticed, starring an actress who will only wear pink and other entertaining dreamers.

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Ann Leary's new book is about a woman whose husband (a TV star) may be cheating on her. In real life, Leary is the wife of comedian and actor Denis Leary. She says that while the main character bears a resemblance to her, the book is not entirely based on fact.

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To swipe the immortal lines uttered by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a great mystery should take "the lid off life and let [you] look at the works." Maureen Corrigan's picks for the top five crime novels of the year do just that.

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Why do Asian kids outperform American kids in math? How did Bill Gates become a billionaire computer entrepreneur? Malcolm Gladwell takes on these questions and more in his book Outliers. He argues that the "self-made man" is a myth.

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Whoopi Goldberg in a milk bath? Meryl Streep in a white mime face? After training her lens on some of the most notable faces of our day, the photographer reveals the stories behind some of her famous portraits.

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In More Information Than You Require, the follow-up to the best-selling The Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgman offers another compilation of false facts and trivia.

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