(View entire post here) When I began to research and interview the later-life achievers featured in my new book, I tried to maintain a warm but objective distance. It wasn't always easy. They were very engaging. They introduced me to friends and family and opened their lives to me. They shared their goals, struggles, and victories along with their intimate secrets, their most painful memories....

Only one person was on the esplanade, a schoolgirl in uniform. She stood some twenty feet from him, in full view of his barge, sheltering from the rain beneath the archway that separates the Cannaregio canal from the Ghetto. She lighted a cigarette, and he watched with desire as wisps of smoke drifted out toward the canal and mingled with the mist. Perhaps he would ask her for a cigarette. Foreign...

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Fools Paradise by Jennifer Stevenson.Her entry begins:Fools Paradise is my favorite book about my favorite men—stagehands, those blue-collar knights of chivalry, those workaholic, playaholic, unsung heroes behind the curtain.This book more than any other came about through a collage. I knew it would begin with a Porsche Targa full of live smelt. I knew the hero

This is a tiny book that doubles both as a children's fable and an allegory for adults. It may be a fast read, but it has enormous resonances. The narrative is based in a mysterious town without animals or birds. Legend tells that they have been spirited away by the Pied Piper figure of Nehi, the mountain demon. The animals live in a paradise where no beast devours another and harmony reigns.

Most people believe the Sidhe are long dead, exterminated centuries ago when the males of the race rose up and fought alongside the humans subjugated and enslaved by the female Sidhe. But Jarek Reen knows better: he's discovered, the painful way, that the Sidhe are alive and well, and still screwing over humanity. They've already killed his sister, so he's not surprised when he disc...

Really pleased with the start to the year. Hit the ground running although a scatter gun approach means all sorts of things have been read without much direction. One of the highlights was reading another great JG Ballard in Rushing to paradise with all of the hallmarks of his work with strange obsessive end of worlders and the innocents dragged up and excited to be in their world. it also include...

A graphic novel about the political and social situation in Iran is beginning as a serialized web comic in seven languages. Zahra's Paradise, the first installment of which was published online on February 19, will ultimately see publication by First Second Books in 2011.

The after-life is a pretty well-explored destination, both in the sense that, if most of the world's great faiths are to be believed, all of us end up there, and in that it has been the subject of some of the most enduring works of literature known to humankind. They include Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Book of Job, Swedenborg's New Jerusalem and, juxtapos...

Laila Lalami's first collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, opened with four Moroccans attempting to exit their beleaguered homeland across the Strait of Gibraltar, in hope to (illegally) enter into that European diasporic "paradise" that her North African predecessor Tahar Ben Jelloun has long dramatised in French. In her debut novel, Secret Son, she explores what it...

There is a pace about Ballard that grabs you by the eyeballs and leads you into places that you fear to look at. You know that the relationship between the passionate but unhinged Dr Barbara and the young lonely animal rights campaigner Neil is going to go to dark places. She is determined to save the albatross nesting on an island being used by the French for nuclear experiments but he is followi...