Does someone on your holiday gift list have a grand passion, a subject he or she is utterly fascinated by?
If you think a catfish is a river-dwelling bottom feeder that has felinelike whiskers, chances are you're not very active on social media. That also means you've probably never heard of Nev Schulman, who is credited with turning the word into a social media term through his movie Catfish, or his new book, In …
Nightstand
Alafair Burke
For her latest project, novelist Burke is collaborating with bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark on a new suspense series about Laurie Moran, TV producer of a show that features cold case murders. We caught up with Burke, 45, on Nov. 18, the day of the release of …
Notable
Forever Sherlock
While we impatiently await the next episodes of BBC's Sherlock, here are books to satisfy our interest in the Great Detective.
LOS ANGELES — It has been called the letter that launched a literary genre — 16,000 amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness words written by Neal Cassady to his friend Jack Kerouac in 1950.
![This image provided by the Profiles in History auction house shows the cover of an auction catalog, featuring several pages of what has become known as "The Joan Anderson Letter," some 16,000 Benzedrine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness words written by Neal Cassady to his friend Jack Kerouac in 1950. The letter, Kerouac said shortly before his death, would have transformed his counterculture muse Cassady into a towering literary figure, if only it hadn't been lost. As it turns out, the letter wasn't lost, just misplaced, and it's scheduled to go on sale Dec. 17, 2014. [Associated Press]](https://web.archive.org/web/20141202032333im_/http://www.tampabay.com/resources/images/dti/2014/11/0434758872_14268519.jpg)
The 2014 National Book Awards, announced Wednesday night, honored a poet with a long and distinguished career, a fiction writer's first book, a deeply personal memoir of childhood and a work of nonfiction about the most populous nation on the planet.
Chances are that if you are a younger person, the name Gary Hart means absolutely nothing to you. And therein lies the tragedy of a rising, promising political career that so spectacularly crashed and burned over the course of a single week in 1987.
Sometimes, the characters in Some Luck, Jane Smiley's latest novel, resemble the Osage orange hedge that separates the field from the back acreage of Walter Langdon's Iowa farm: "horse-high, bull-strong, and hog-tight." Meaning they're tough. Meaning they take what life throws at them — drought, …
Nightstand
Wilbur Smith
Smith, 81, was born in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, in Central Africa, where he spent his childhood on his family's ranch. In 1964, his upbringing served him well with the successful publication of Where the Lion Feeds, which became the first book in his …
Notable
Literary lights
Treat yourself to one of these new books by three of the best fiction writers working today.
For book reviews and book news, browse the Books section of the Tampa Bay Times.
