Books

Cloris Leachman was convinced she was dead. "I felt the outlines of my body and nothing was in it," she recalls. "I had no brains, no guts, no heart, no bones. This was heaven and I was dead and I was standing there." Of course, she'd just been flung horizontally into the air -- gripped by a single arm and leg -- and twirled around by her dance partner, Corky Ballas, in an encore performance of their "Dancing With the Stars" routine on the talk show "The View."

Amazon.com Inc. on Monday blamed a "cataloging error" for the removal of more than 57,000 titles from its main search function. The disappearance of books such as "Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography," "Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk" and "Greek Homosexuality" this weekend created an uproar among consumers who wondered why works that dealt with sexual orientation were being marginalized.

On a cloudy day in the meatpacking district, images of the old world -- men in bloody aprons, lonely figures with upturned collars walking down by the Hudson -- blur into those of the new: freakishly tall blonds who get their spike heels stuck in the cobblestones. This is Jay McInerney territory. His latest book, "How It Ended: New and Collected Stories," covers several decades in this, his chosen neighborhood, his adopted hometown within a town.

Meet Inspector O, a detective with North Korea's Ministry of People's Security. He is a man who loves his country but harbors a knowing skepticism about its leadership. He rolls his eyes at the communist propaganda and balks at wearing the red lapel pin of founder Kim Il Sung that is de rigueur for North Koreans. He struggles to keep his humanity in an authoritarian and increasingly corrupt society. But Inspector O isn't real.

The book "Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit" -- based on the work of the late Sister Corita, a legendary art instructor from L.A.'s Immaculate Heart College -- had little immediate effect when it came out in 1992. "It kind of fell flat," said Jan Steward, a former student who co-wrote the book. But in the years since, the copiously illustrated primer attracted more and more fans.

When your last name is Yasgur, you get used to people asking: "Yasgur? As in that Yasgur?" And if you're Abigail Yasgur -- second cousin of the late Max Yasgur, who thrust the family name into the spotlight by lending his upstate New York dairy farm for the Woodstock festival -- the frequent queries make you proud enough to want to share the tale.

For 40 minutes last month he held them spellbound, reading about America in 1898. John Sayles didn't just give the crowd a taste of his new novel, "Some Time in the Sun" -- he performed a comedy about tabloid newsboys in New York, playing 26 characters with thick, period accents. "WAR!" Sayles boomed in the voice of a 13-year-old newsie thrilled ("Trilled!") that the Spanish-American War had boosted his daily street sales: "Remember the . . . Maine!

The best way to think about this year's BookExpo America -- the book industry's annual trade show and convention that concluded Sunday at the Jacob Javits Center -- is as a mirror: What you see reflects who you are.

I have to admit that when Michael DeLuca called me earlier this year, saying he was finally going to get "Moneyball" made into a movie, I figured he must've been smoking the proverbial Hollywood crack pipe. Anyone who loves baseball has read Michael Lewis' bestseller about how Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane almost single-handedly upended the traditional way baseball evaluates athletic talent.