Caroline

Reporting from New York — Maria Sharapova was the creator at Arthur Ashe Stadium on Monday afternoon. Sharapova was the one who came to the net more often, who tried to craft openings by using drop shots, one of which even got her opponent down on the ground, on her back looking up and watching the Sharapova lob sail over her head. But that lob was just long and Caroline Wozniacki won the point. Even if the 14th-seeded Sharapova, a three-time Grand Slam winner, was more the aggressor in this U.S. Open fourth-round match, it was top-seeded Wozniacki who will play in the quarterfinals after her 6-3, 6-4 win. Though the score makes the match seem unremarkable, the pair played for nearly two hours.

Decades past high school, Gail Caldwell had the luck to find a true best friend — a woman whose strengths and weaknesses perfectly complemented her own. Then she endured the tragedy of losing her, an ending that she shares at the beginning of her affecting new grief memoir, "Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship. " Caldwell, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her work as chief book critic for the Boston Globe, beckons us into her story with lines that evoke Hemingway: "I had a friend," she writes, "and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too. " Caldwell's friend, Caroline Knapp, was a columnist for the Boston Phoenix and the bestselling author of several books.

Caroline Wozniacki , top-seeded for the U.S. Open, won her third consecutive Pilot Pen tennis title, beating Russian Nadia Petrova , 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, in the final at New Haven, Conn. The victory capped a good week for the 20-year-old Danish star, who won in Montreal on Monday and heads to New York with four wins this season, the most of any player on tour. "I feel great," Wozniacki said. "I have a Tuesday start. So, you know, I'm on a roll. " Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine defeated Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, in the men's final for his second title of the year.

Justine Henin made another comeback Wednesday.  The former No. 1, playing her fourth tournament since coming out of retirement, rallied to beat No. 2-seeded Caroline Wozniacki 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-4 in the quarterfinals of the Sony Ericsson Open at Key Biscayne, Fla.     Andy Roddick advanced to the men's semifinals when he beat No. 33-seeded Nicolas Almagro 6-3, 6-3. Roddick, the 2004 champion, has yet to drop a set and has been broken once in four matches.

Never Breathe a Word The Collected Stories Caroline Blackwood Counterpoint: 366 pp., $26 It is clear that we read for pleasure; what is less obvious are the varieties of pleasures we experience. Pleasing isn't always pleasant. Take Caroline Blackwood's stories -- they are rare in their brutal exposure and are deeply troubling to read. Yet "Never Breathe a Word" is nothing less than a marvelous slide into an emotional abyss. In Blackwood's stories, women -- almost always women -- have quietly slipped outside their conventional roles.

With a little stretch, Jelena Jankovic's victory Sunday in the women's singles final of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells could be turned into a California angle. Headline: Local Woman Makes Good. Jankovic, of course, is about as local as Antarctica. She has spent the bulk of her 25 years as far away from California as you can get. Not by choice, by coincidence of birth. She is Serbian and proud of it, although she lists her residence as Dubai, which is one of those tax havens to which rich tennis players gravitate.

Caroline McWilliams, an actress and director best known to television audiences for her work on the series "Benson" and "Soap," has died. She was 64. McWilliams died Feb. 11 at her home in Los Angeles from complications of multiple myeloma, her family said. Caroline Margaret McWilliams was born April 4, 1945, in Seattle but grew up in Barrington, R.I. She graduated in 1966 with a bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Her first break on television was on "Guiding Light," a longtime CBS soap opera in which she appeared for several years beginning in 1969.

Rewilding the World Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution Caroline Fraser Metropolitan Books: 402 pp., $28.50 Coyote at the Kitchen Door Living With Wildlife in Suburbia Stephen DeStefano Harvard University Press: 224 pp., $24.95 "Over the years, coyotes ate many of Michael Soulé's cats." So begins Caroline Fraser's engaging new book, "Rewilding the World: Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution." Soulé, a prominent biologist, discovered that where human and coyote populations overlap, the droppings -- "scats" -- of one in five coyotes contained domestic cat fur. It wasn't, however, just anxiety over his cats that prompted Soulé to research coyotes in the canyons outside his native San Diego.

The Williams sisters will end their season with another title matchup. Venus Williams defeated Jelena Jankovic , 5-7, 6-3, 6-4, on Saturday in one semifinal at the Sony Ericsson Championships at Doha, Qatar. Serena Williams won the other when Caroline Wozniacki quit because of an abdominal injury while trailing, 6-4, 0-1. Serena, who secured the year-end No. 1 ranking last week, is returning to the final of the WTA Tour's season-ending championships for the first time since 2004.

At 9:12 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, before a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd looking for another Melanie Miracle in the U.S. Open tennis tournament, Cinderella's slipper came off. The mighty mite of this two-week event, Melanie Oudin, stopped her motion on her second serve as somebody yelled from the upper deck, "Wake up, Melanie." The crowd hushed the creep, Oudin made the serve, soon hit one last backhand wide and walked to the net to shake hands with Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark.