Book Review

If there's a more beautiful museum exhibition catalog than LACMA's "Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective," I haven't seen it. Exquisitely designed by Lorraine Wild and featuring knockout new photographs by Fredrik Nilson of every work in the show, the book sets a standard of excellence that matches Price's extraordinary art. FOR THE RECORD: "Ken Price Sculpture": A review in the Sept. 12 Calendar section of the LACMA exhibition catalog "Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective" misspelled the last name of photographer Fredrik Nilsen as Nilson.

Reader Marvyn Lindsey found it “bizarre” that a long piece of black tape was blocking part of the book review he wanted to read. Marilyn Dixon wondered how a length of the tape ended up across two pages in her Business section. “I just thought it was sort of an odd thing,” she said. “Is it part of publishing, and how did it get in my paper?” Sally Eply found a section of black tape on the editorial page and asked, simply, “Why?” It wasn't censorship, as other readers have feared.  And yes, the tape is part of publishing - specifically the printing process, explained Russ Newton, Times senior vice president of operations.

Michael Chabon joined us for a video interview to talk about "Telegraph Avenue," his creative process, reaching a point of despair, whether it's risky to write across gender and race, and "really really really long sentences. " And how the invented world of a novel can be made real, as it comes alive on film or even on a film's sets, and that's like stepping into a dreamscape. In the interview, Chabon talks about world building in his novels. He considers whether it's easier to create a fiction that's based in the pop culture we know or to invent an alternative reality.

Three years ago, a first-time novelist and longtime English teacher named Selden Edwards popped up on bestseller lists with "The Little Book," a time-traveling fantasy that included stops in late-20th century San Francisco, 1950s New England and World War II era London, with a great deal of lingering in fin de siècle Vienna. "The Little Book," in fact, opens as Wheeler Burden wanders the streets of the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is 1897, a somewhat bewildering time for a man who won't be born until 1941.

No Easy Day The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden Mark Owen with Kevin Maurer Dutton: 315 pp., $26.95 Former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette did not put the first slug into Osama bin Laden when SEALs raided the terrorist's lair in Pakistan last year in May. But he fired follow-up shots quickly and without remorse, as he describes in vivid, gruesome detail in "No Easy Day," written under the pseudonym Mark...

A best-selling British author has been caught red-handed slamming others' books on Amazon while praising his own under a number of pseudonyms. It was the assiduous work of Jeremy Duns, another writer, that laid out a case demonstrating that prize-winning mystery writer R.J. Ellory had been writing the "sock puppet" reviews on Amazon. Ellory has admitted to using the sock puppetry -- pseudonymous handles to post positive Amazon reviews of his own books and one-star reviews of others'.

Summer might be drawing to a close, but don't worry - there's still plenty of time to squeeze in a few more chills provided by new mysteries and thrillers from Karin Fossum, Tana French and Thomas H. Cook . * Other Scandinavian crime writers may be better known, sell more copies or have more movies made from their work, but no one can thoroughly chill the blood the way Karin Fossum can. It's not that Fossum is unknown. The London Sunday Times named her one of the 50 greatest crime writers of all time (Henning Mankell and the pioneering team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were the only other Scandinavians on the list)

Capital A Novel John Lanchester W.W. Norton: 527 pp., $26.95 When an author finds a one-word title that fits his book perfectly, it's usually a good portent for its content. And certainly "Capital" is doubly eponymous here, for London - the great city, once capital of an empire and now, since the deregulatory Big Bang of 1986, of the financial world - and for the lucre that is lifeblood to both. What we encounter at the heart of this vibrant piece of fiction, pulsating with events and emotions, is not mere cold cash but also that grander aspect of money as something expected to go forth and multiply - what Karl Marx was talking about in his famous "Das Kapital," providing yet another sly aspect to Lanchester's protean title.