Fiction

At a university lab in a Tokyo suburb, engineering students are wiring a rubbery robot face to simulate six basic expressions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise and disgust. Hooked up to a database of words clustered by association, the robot -- dubbed Kansei, or "sensibility" -- responds to the word "war" by quivering in what looks like disgust and fear. It hears "love," and its pink lips smile. "To live among people, robots need to handle complex social tasks," said project leader Junichi Takeno of Meiji University.

Gilt A Novel Katherine Longshore Penguin: 416 pp., $17.99, ages 12 and up King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded. If there's anyone in history who personifies the treacheries of marriage, it's King Henry VIII of England, who is best known for the beheadings he inflicted during a reign of nearly 38 years. What led to such a barbaric punishment for the sexual indiscretions of his betrothed is the central theme of "Gilt," which tells the fictionalized history of wife No. 5: Catherine Howard, "the forgotten daughter of the forgotten third son of the man who had once been Duke of Norfolk," writes novelist Katherine Longshore.

'50/50" was the first feature script I ever wrote. The reason? When it came to writing, there was nothing exceptional about any of my ideas. I'd always aspired to write movies like the very ones that inspired me: "The Apartment," "Harry and Tonto," "Harold and Maude. " Comedies that are not only funny, they're tragic and they're human. But those movies are experiential meditations, and when I was in my early 20s, the only thing I knew to write about was what it's like to be single, horny and terrified of women.

A polite comedy about a potentially rude subject,"Hysteria"takes its title from the medical condition diagnosed to women in Victorian England for any number of unrelated symptoms. As a treatment, doctors would stimulate a woman to orgasm, referred to as "manual massage to paroxysm," leading one beleaguered physician, essentially as a labor-saving device, to invent the vibrator. In the film, which opens in Los Angeles on May 18, the progressive young doctor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy)

THE INCURSION by Dirk Hanson (Little, Brown: $16.95; 288 pp.). Peter Cassidy is just a regular guy in today's world, a 29-year-old solid-state physicist working for a major corporation who got tired of it all and decided he'd rather go fly fishing. So he chucked his job and did just that. But he gets called back.

In a UCLA classroom one day not long ago, Alain Mabanckou was teaching a course in post-colonial African fiction, which he instructs in his French mother tongue, one of several languages he speaks. With his easygoing yet focused manner, soccer player's graceful body language and a way funkier fashion sense than the average college don, the 46-year-old Mabanckou kept his students' attention, framing moral quandaries for them to consider and regaling them with technical explanations of an African army's " technique de la terre brulee" (scorched earth policy)

You'd be hard-pressed to find a musical with less dramatic tension than "Million Dollar Quartet" anywhere this side of a "My Little Pony" touring show. The production that opened Tuesday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts really just wants to let the good times roll, so you can be glad it devotes only about 10 minutes of its 105-minute running time to drumming up token conflicts between Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and their visionary producer, Sam Phillips.

Panel: Fiction: At Loose Ends When: April 21, 12:00 p.m. Where: Annenberg Auditorium on the USC campus Who: Seth Greenland, Eleanor Henderson, Josh Rolnick, Jervey Tervalon, moderator Rachel Resnick Information: http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks

Jesmyn Ward was struggling. Despite two master's degrees and five years of work experience, her job situation was difficult: She commuted an hour each way to a low-paying college teaching job. In her writing career, things were even worse. She sent out stories and got back rejection letters. Her agent tried and failed, and tried and failed again, to sell her book. "I almost gave up," Ward says. In the spring of 2008, she thought, "Maybe I should stop this. Maybe I should just quit and do something that would give me a steady, higher paycheck, like nursing.

Months before the release of director Ridley Scott's "Prometheus," the studio behind his big-budget science-fiction film has been building buzz online with an unorthodox campaign. Aside from traditional movie trailers, 20th Century Fox has been carefully introducing the film's major characters (and a bit of back story) through a series of online videos - including one released Tuesday that features actor Michael Fassbender ("Shame") in an eerily deadpan performance as an android named David.

NEW YORK — The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism awarded here Monday demonstrated the resilience of old media and the ascendance of the new, as the venerable Philadelphia Inquirer won the prestigious public service medal and the 7-year-old Huffington Post took the national reporting prize for its exploration of the challenges that confront wounded U.S. service members. Digital-focused media first leaped into the Pulitzer winner's circle last year when ProPublica won the national reporting prize.

Dora Saint, a prolific and gentle chronicler of English village life who wrote a popular series of novels under the pen name Miss Read, died April 7 at her home in Great Shefford, west of London, British media reported. She was 98. Attention to the small details of ordinary life marked her fictional works, which appeared almost annually between 1955 and 1996. Her mother's maiden name was Read, and she adopted it to write of the small conflicts and quiet excitements of life in the fictional villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green.