Salon's Favorite Thrillers

Nick Hornby, Judy Blume, and more weigh in

(NEWSER) - What was the best book of the year? Salon asked Nick Hornby, Junot Diaz, Curtis Sittenfeld, and other people with better literary credentials than ours what they enjoyed in 2009. Their responses are in the photo gallery. More»

Step outside to find the best seasonal ingredients

(NEWSER) - Summer cooking should combine those elements we love most about the season: fresh fruits and vegetables, bright colors, arresting aromas, and the great outdoors. So NPR selected the 10 best cookbooks for jumping out of the frying pan and into the garden:

1. Simply Organic: A Cookbook for Sustainable, Seasonal, and Local Ingredients: Organic creations to complement eight distinct seasons.

Mark Sarvas and Laura Miller recommend the best works to be overlooked this year.

(NEWSER) - Looking for a read off the beaten path? NPR asks two literary bloggers—Laura Miller of Salon and Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation—for the best works, fictional or factual, that were overlooked by mainstream book-review sections in 2007.

• The Farther Shore, by Matthew Eck: "A new kind of military novel"
• Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille, by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop: The last work of the legendary Argentine experimental novelist

For some good reading, check out these books recommended by your favorite authors

(NEWSER) - Read the books writers are raving about with the help of this list from the Guardian:

1. David Hare: Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern
2. Nicola Barker: Teenage, Jon Savage
3. Margaret Drabble: Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee

Author's debut was 'collage of others' work'

(NEWSER) - Bookseller Quentin Rowan appears to have forged a writing career entirely by raiding the contents of his shelves. Publisher Little, Brown & Co. recalled every single copy of his debut spy thriller, Assassin of Secrets—written under the pseudonym QR Markham—after discovering that passages had been lifted from more than a dozen other spy novels, both classic and contemporary, reports the Wall Street Journal . In one place, a nine-paragraph passage lifted from a Robert Ludlum thriller flows cleanly into a seven-paragraph passage plucked from one of John Gardner's James Bond novels. More»