Literary

Baseball, as we've frequently been told, lends itself to literature. The absence of a clock, the elegant geometry of the playing field, even that the best hitters fail two-thirds of the time: all these have proved irresistible to writers ever since Casey struck out with two men on back in 1888. One of the nation's most prominent political columnists cultivates a secondary persona as a kind of intellectual of the diamond and our most prestigious literary magazine employs a more or less full-time baseball correspondent.

If Carlos Fuentes could have invented the perfect character to star in one of his novels, he might have come up with a protagonist named Carlos Fuentes. That character would be a glamorous global citizen who was born in Panama as a diplomat's son, then hopscotched to Washington, D.C., London, Paris and other glittering power centers. A dapper ladies' man who married an actress and claimed to have had affairs with screen sirens Jeanne Moreau and Jean Seberg. A lifelong adventurer, like the tragedy-haunted journalist hero of Fuentes' novel "The Old Gringo," played by Gregory Peck in the 1989 film version . A man who, like many of Fuentes' characters, overcomes personal tragedy of near-mythic proportions partly through the sheer power of his own relentless drive and productivity.

Stephen King "couldn't stop reading" it. Stephenie Meyer was so "obsessed . . . I had to take it with me out to dinner and hide it under the edge of the table." Publisher's Weekly called it "the best book of 2008." What's the source of all the buzz? Suzanne Collins' novel "The Hunger Games" -- an action-packed, post-apocalyptic, young adult fantasy in which 24 children are selected to compete to the death before a television audience. The hang-on-the-edge-of-your-seat dystopian fiction is now in its ninth printing, with foreign publishing rights sold for 35 territories and a movie in the works.

On the home page of the Los Angeles Review of Books , a crisp color image of a couple treading water in a pool fills much of the screen. An essay probes the meaning of pools "in our lives and in our art. " That piece sits atop a video interview with cultural historian Leo Braudy, testifying to the Hollywood sign's totemic presence in Los Angeles. That distinctly western sensibility is among the most striking features of the new online book review, launched last week with the stated ambition of combining "the great American tradition of the serious book review with the evolving technologies of the Web. " The site, known in short as the LARB, offers a big-tent approach — promising coverage of two dozen different genres, from fiction to film to comics.

However creepy Hollywood Boulevard became over the past so many tawdry years, it offered one sure cultural oasis in Book City ("Closing the Book on a Landmark," Dec. 10). How sad to learn that this wonderful literary depot is being forced out of the neighborhood by the very redevelopers whose motive, I thought, is to return a semblance of legitimacy to the street and replace all the last vestiges of riffraff with a higher quality of civic life. I fear another mindless CityWalk. Give me culture with sleaze over no culture at all. DAVID LEWIS Piedmont

Re book critics almost as reliable as the people who write the blurbs for film ads: Larry Ceplair's comments about Michael Herr's "Walter Winchell: A Novel" (May 27) are a model of the nit-picking critique which makes so many of us (unfairly, perhaps) classify critics as literary "hit men" who dote on cutesy negativism. They too often get caught up in the cleverness of their put-downs and lose any sense of objectivity. I was asked by a local bookseller to read a pre-publication copy of "Walter Winchell" and advise her as to its worth.

The Times generally is effective in reporting on the multiethnic community. Still, the writing and photography for "A Conversation With the Soul of Mexico" (by Anthony Day and Sergio Mun~oz, April 30) were outstanding. Cheers for assigning the art and writing to people of the ethnic group being reported on. Poet Octavio Paz, Mun~oz, Day and photographers Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Ricardo Salazar have indeed captured the essence of Mexico. Euvonne Chiuco Palmdale Mun~oz and Day talk about intellectuals being the great voices of social commentary in Latin societies, but where are these types of voices in America today?

Mark Sarvas, who was raised in a Hungarian Jewish family in Queens, N.Y., has become notorious as the acid-fingered blogger at the Elegant Variation, a literary site he launched in 2003. Right out of the gate, he's been a champion of authors he loves -- John Banville, J.M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith -- and a harsh critic of those he doesn't: the Los Angeles Times Book Review, British provocateur Christopher Hitchens, literary "it" boy Keith Gessen, and, going back to the site's first week, writer Steve Almond.

The Possessed Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them Elif Batuman Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 304 pp., $15 Elif Batuman teaches at Stanford University, and her first book of essays, "The Possessed," dances between autobiography, travel-writing and literary criticism with dazzling flair and originality. "While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone of planet Earth . . . is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering," she writes in "Babel in California," "one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to make comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness.

Daunting as it may be to assemble a centuries-spanning assessment of any country, even one with a fairly linear march through history, how does one approach a culture as unstable, contradictory and contested as ours? Where do you start? Where do you stop? And how, exactly, do you know when you're done? That was the task faced by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, editors of the gargantuan "A New Literary History of America" (Harvard University Press: 1,096 pp., $49.95). By their reckoning, "new" means as recent as Barack Obama; "literary" means anything from Emily Dickinson's poetry to hip-hop's wild style; and "America" means the United States, not the two continents that stretch across a hemisphere.

NEW YORK—There are author success stories. There's winning the lottery. And then there's Chad Harbach. A long-suffering, often-starving MFA graduate, Harbach spent much of his 20s and 30s working temp jobs so he could write a novel, sometimes with barely $100 in his bank account. He thought no one would ever read his book, titled "The Art of Fielding. " It featured, after all, some pretty ambitious literary writing, a prominent gay character and a baseball motif, all no-nos for anyone with aspirations to the fiction bestseller list.

Sometimes you can't put your finger on what you've been missing until you encounter it again. After seeing two fine revivals of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter - "Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum and the British production of "The Caretaker" at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, respectively - I suddenly realized how ravenous I was for language in the theater with poetic density and grit. Beckett, 20th century playwriting's No. 1 game-changer, and Pinter, his most original disciple, were writers steeped in literature.

NEW YORK - It started with a story for a magazine. In 2008, during a trip to Japan, New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear decided to write about cellphone novels, a phenomenon - involving young women writing largely for young women, posting fiction from their phones to media-sharing websites - that was then shaking up Japanese publishing. "It seemed like a great way to explore the literary culture," she remembers, although by the time she got home, the parameters had shifted, with the effects of the global economic crisis rippling through the American book industry.

The back-to-back blockbuster successes of "Harry Potter," "Twilight" and now "The Hunger Games" have turned the hunt for fresh young-adult fiction white-hot in Hollywood, as studios try to turn what used to be a phenomenon into what might be a formula. Frenzied auctions are underway for books that haven't even been published. Studios are paying as much as $1 million for the rights to adapt titles that are relatively modest sellers, particularly those featuring science-fiction, fantasy and dystopian themes.

Reading for My Life Writings, 1958-2008 John Leonard Edited by Sue Leonard Viking: 382 pp., $35 I want to talk about criticism, about what it is and how it operates: an issue that was one of the abiding passions of John Leonard's career. And not just criticism as a form of service journalism (although, in part, that too) but criticism as an expression of social and cultural engagement, a function of political or literary life. It's no coincidence that on the day before he died - of lung cancer, at age 69 - Leonard spent hours waiting to vote for Barack Obama for president.

Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple - residents of Silver Spring, Md.? British novelist Agatha Christie's classic mysteries, such as "Murder on the Orient Express," now belong to a U.S. company. Acorn Media Group snapped up 64% of Christie's literary estate, making the private company the majority owner of more than 80 novels, 19 plays and nearly 40 television films. The collection had belonged to Chorion Ltd. of London for more than a decade. Christie, who died in 1976, is considered the bestselling novelist of all time, with more than 2 billion books sold.

Luis Leal, an internationally recognized scholar of Mexican, Chicano and Latin American literature who was one of the founders of the field of Chicano literary studies, has died. He was 102. Leal, a professor of Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara, died Monday of natural causes at a convalescent hospital in Santa Barbara, said his son, Antonio. A professor at the school since 1976, Leal taught his last class in Chicano literature in late 2004 but remained active as a scholar.

Barney Rosset, who died Tuesday at the age of 89, was the most important American publisher of the 20th century. Sure, he was part of a lineage; it's difficult to imagine Rosset doing what he did for more than 30 years at Grove Press without the example of James Laughlin at the seminal independent New Directions or (further afield) Jack Kahane at Paris' Obelisk Press. And yet Grove, which Rosset bought in 1951 for $3,000 and ran until 1985, remains the touchstone, the publisher most responsible for breaking down American literary puritanism, for defending the idea that art, that literature, is meant to unsettle us, that among its central purposes is to challenge the status quo. Look at the writers Rosset published: Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Malcolm X. Look at the books that he brought into the center of the culture: "Tropic of Cancer," "Waiting for Godot," "Naked Lunch," "Our Lady of the Flowers," "A Confederacy of Dunces," "Cain's Book.

Higher Gossip John Updike Alfred A. Knopf: 502 pp., $40 Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts William H. Gass Alfred A. Knopf: 350 pp., $28.95 Partway through "Higher Gossip," the seventh and final collection of reviews and occasional pieces by the late John Updike, I began to understand the problem I've always had with the author's work. It's pleasant enough - congenial, intelligent, fluidly written - but only rarely is it great. As to why this is, "Higher Gossip" offers an unintended answer by revealing not so much the range of Updike's interests as the chatty conventionality of his ideas.