Witches

At the end of a dirt road deep in the mountains, Consolacion Acay hobbled onto her porch and picked up her tools of the trade: a glass cup, a bamboo straw, a stone the size of an apricot pit and a bottle of potion. Then she began casting spells to heal her client. "I found this stone while I was swimming near waterfalls in the middle of the island," the unassuming 86-year-old said later. "That night I had a dream that taught me how to use the stone to heal people, and I've been doing it ever since.

Christine O'Donnell is promoting her new book, "Troublemaker," whose title is from a Time magazine reference to the former Delaware Senate candidate and "tea party" favorite. In the book, and in recent interviews, O'Donnell has made no secret of one of her big regrets — and her feeling of betrayal at the hands of Bill Maher, a man she had considered a friend. On "Real Time With Bill Maher," the HBO host featured a bit of 1999 video from "Politically Correct" with O'Donnell. In her new book, she says the clip showed a "nothing comment" about a boy she'd known in high school who dabbled in the occult and it started a "modern-day witch hunt – with me cast as … well, as the witch.

The Beginners A Novel Rebecca Wolff Riverhead: 304 pp., $26.95 Poet Rebecca Wolff's first novel, "The Beginners," is a gothic story of sexual awakening with a sharp literary edge. Ginger Pritt, 15, is a year ahead of her age in school in small-town Massachusetts, working in the local diner and learning about sex from her boss' porn stash. She's not unhappy, but her parents are distant and a childhood best friendship is showing signs of fracture. The time is pre-Internet and pre-cellphone, and the setting is — where else?

Witches of East End A Novel Melissa de la Cruz Hyperion: 274 pp., $23.99 Literature for young adults has become such an "it" genre that increasing numbers of big-name authors are trading on their reps to write for younger audiences. Not Melissa de la Cruz. Having won legions of fans with her bestselling Young Adult series "Blue Bloods," she's heading in the opposite direction with "Witches of East End," the first installment in a new series for grownups. This one is definitely not for kids.

Sucker Punch Warner Bros., $28.98; Blu-ray, $29.98/$35.99 "Watchmen" and "300" director Zack Snyder finally works on an original story with "Sucker Punch," a truly bizarre action fantasy starring Emily Browning as an institutionalized woman who retreats into an alternate reality in which she is both a stripper and a warrior woman. The plot primarily provides an excuse to show scene after scene of scantily clad ladies fighting bad guys in slow motion, set against surreal CGI landscapes.

Guys with fangs are so last year. This fall, witches are taking over. You'll find them on HBO's "True Blood," where Sookie will face down a coven this season. They'll be casting spells on their fellow high school students in the CW's "The Secret Circle," a drama from "The Vampire Diaries" creator Kevin Williamson. A particularly wicked one shows up in ABC's "Once Upon a Time" to place a curse on the town of Storybrook. Plus, with NBC's mystery "Grimm" riffing on various fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel's friend with the black pointy hat might soon join the others.

Joseph Wershba, a pioneering CBS reporter and producer whose work on Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" series in the 1950s helped expose the McCarthy era's communist witch hunt and demonstrated the power of television, has died. He was 90. Wershba, a two-time Emmy Award winner who was one of the original segment producers on "60 Minutes," died Saturday of pneumonia at North Shore Hospital on Long Island, said his wife, Shirley. In what became a more than 50-year career in broadcast and print journalism, Wershba joined CBS radio as a news writer in New York in 1944 and later worked on Murrow's "Hear It Now" radio series before it moved to television in 1952 as "See It Now. " Wershba was the on-camera reporter and field producer on "The Case Against Lt. Milo Radulovich A0589839," a 1953 "See It Now" segment that demonstrated the excesses and dangers of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade and the effects of guilt by association.

Akata Witch A Novel Nnedi Okorafor Viking: 352 pp., $17.99, ages 12 and older The protagonist at the center of the young-adult novel "Akata Witch" lives in many worlds. She is, in the truest sense, African American: Nigerian by ancestry, American by birth. Born in New York, she moved to West Africa with her parents and brothers when she was 9. But Sunny Nwazue is also albino, with skin the color of "sour milk" and "hazel eyes that look like God ran out of the right color.

Sometimes inspiration comes in the unlikeliest places. While vacationing in Puerto Vallarta in fall 2008, USC professor Deborah Harkness, a historian of science, was consumed with the upcoming bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth, but the rest of the world, including the airport in the Mexican resort city, was gripped by a madness spread by vampires: The last of Stephenie Meyer's four "Twilight" novels had just been published. "To walk through the airport was to be hit with vampires, witches, ghosts and demons at every angle in the bookstores," says Harkness, a good-humored and enthusiastic woman of 46, over a cappuccino in Pasadena.

The families of eight mentally disabled adults on Tuesday sued an El Monte day care center and government agencies for allegedly failing to properly investigate their complaints about verbal, physical and sexual abuse at the facility. The families said they had complained to managers at the center, formerly known as Healthy Start, and government authorities that their adult children were delivered home late ? sometimes with bruises, scratches and skin rashes ? and that they had turned sullen, fearful and withdrawn.