Writers

Novelist Karen Essex remembers when she first encountered the name Aspasia, a courtesan in ancient Greece, while wading through a copy of Plutarch in graduate school. "Plutarch suddenly starts talking about Aspasia as Pericles' mistress," she said, mentioning the Athenian leader. Aspasia "had the respect of the most intelligent men in an Athens in which women weren't even citizens and were completely sequestered.

Reality TV producer FremantleMedia North America fired back at the Writers Guild of America, West, dismissing its "American Idol" Truth Tour as nothing more than a caravan of misinformation.

Craig Johnson comes as advertised. Standing outside the Autry National Center on a boiling summer afternoon, the Wyoming-based crime novelist is decked out in a long-sleeve shirt made of heavy cotton, scuffed brown boots and a 10-gallon hat that provides shade, but not nearly enough. Spotting his interlocutor, Johnson sticks out his hand and delivers a booming "How ya doin'?!"

Conservative columnist Robert Novak, a fixture on the Washington scene since the administration of John F. Kennedy, announced Monday that he has a brain tumor and will begin treatment soon. In the meantime, he said, "I will be suspending my journalistic work for an indefinite but, God willing, not too lengthy period." Novak, 77, became ill Sunday while he and his wife were visiting their daughter on Cape Cod.

Writing HAS always been a cherished dream. I was born and raised on the banks of the Yangtze River. Although I grew up in a residential compound belonging to the factory where my mother worked, I had this grand dream to become a writer ever since my teacher read my compositions. I saw myself grasping a pen to write beautiful, compelling things.

One of the fascinating things about the hard-boiled tradition is its geographic flexibility. Writers all over the world have taken the form, altered it to suit their times and temperaments and made it at home almost everywhere. The peripatetic Michael Dibdin -- who died last year, a few days after his 60th birthday, and whose final novel, "End Games" has recently come out in paperback -- may demonstrate this principle better than anyone.

Judy Blume has written "a book for every conversation you do not want to have with your child," quipped one of the emcees at Blumesday -- a sold-out event celebrating the 70th birthday of the bestselling author at Hollywood's M Bar on Friday night.

NEW YORK -- "I turned 50 and realized I'd been around for ages." That's Hanif Kureishi, novelist and screenwriter ("My Beautiful Laundrette," "Venus"), talking about the panorama of his latest book, "Something to Tell You." "I could remember the '60s, and indeed the '50s, as well as the '70s and '80s . . .," Kureishi tells me during a conversation in the offices of his publisher, Scribner. "So I wanted to do something a bit bigger.

NEW YORK -- Last winter, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison received a phone call from Sen. Barack Obama, then the underdog to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Obama had contacted Morrison to ask for her support. But before they got into politics, the author and the candidate chatted about literature.

Like everyone else at the Old Dominion Literary Festival, Southern California poet Douglas Kearney had turned his ringer off. So when a stranger called and left an undecipherable message, Kearney, preparing for his reading, didn't think much of it. As a result, he was late to learn he'd won a $50,000 Whiting Writers' Award. Poets apply for many things: graduate school, grants, residency programs, prizes, faculty positions.