Ian Mcewan

J.K. Rowling, the creator of boy wizard Harry Potter, was voted Britain's greatest living writer in a survey released Thursday. Readers of the Book Magazine ranked Rowling ahead of literary heavyweights including Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Harold Pinter and A.S. Byatt. Rowling, who is writing the seventh and final Potter book, received almost three times as many votes as fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, who is No. 2 on the list.

"Hanna" starts off like a house afire but soon burns itself out. Blessed with considerable virtues, including a clever concept, crackling filmmaking and a charismatic star, it ultimately squanders all of them, undone by an unfortunate lack of subtlety and restraint. Subtlety and restraint may sound like odd things to look for in an adrenalized thriller about a teenage girl who's been trained as a world-class assassin. But when you consider the "Bourne" trilogy, the class acts of contemporary thrillers, those films were smart enough never to be crude and heavy-handed with their characters, a trap the caricature-heavy "Hanna" does not even attempt to avoid.

In a literary version of Live Aid, the 1985 two-continent rock concert that has funneled $144 million to African famine relief, U.S. and U.K. authors hope to raise money for Indian Ocean tsunami victims through a book collecting first chapters of their works-in-progress. The paperback book, called "New Beginnings," will be published March 3 -- World Book Day -- in the United States, Great Britain and Germany.

Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were among 18 finalists announced Friday for the first-ever Man International Booker Prize, a lifetime achievement award worth about $115,000. "For us, these are 18 authors who combine uniqueness and universality and remind us irresistibly of the joy of reading," said novelist John Casey, chairman of the Booker judging panel. Casey spoke at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

Fiction 1. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson ($14) 2. Loving Frank by Nancy Horan ($14) 3. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen ($13.95) 4. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho ($13.95) 5. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan ($13.95) 6. Away by Amy Bloom ($14) 7. The Shack by William P. Young ($14.99) 8. In the Woods by Tana French ($14) 9. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ($16) 10. The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber ($14.95) Nonfiction 1. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle ($14) 2.

BOB WOODWARD, Joan Didion and Seymour Hersh are among those who have agreed to participate in a short promotional film for David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter," the final book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist who was killed last spring in a car accident. The film, expected to run 25 to 30 minutes, will premiere Nov. 11 at New York City's Two Boots Pioneer Theater and then will screen in dozens of cities nationwide in November and December.

1974: Unhappy at summer camp, I holed up in my bunk and read Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Bernard Malamud's "The Natural. " The camp might have been awful, but the books were anything but. 1980: In June, I attended a writers conference at UC Berkeley and met Grace Paley. In July, I read Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem. " Both changed the way I think about stories and narrative. You can't get any better than that. 1982: In Cambridge, Mass., I read Albert Camus, Henry Miller, Walker Percy, Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker" and "The Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet.