With ten novels published by the time she was thirty-seven, Jodi Picoult ranks among the more prolific and ambitious young American writers. She has been characterized by critics as a women's fiction author; she contests this label, however, citing her...

Jodi Picoult has a way -- some reviewers call it downright clairvoyant -- of homing in on a moral issue just as it breaks into national debate. She has built a career on fiction that seems to riff off the talk shows, leap from...

Milwaukee native Andy Mozina returns home this week to read from his first full-length fiction collection, intriguingly titled "The Women Were Leaving the Men." Here readers will meet a string of uniquely drawn characters, such as the divorced astronaut who has just returned from...

Author Marianne Wiggins doesn't pretend she's up on modern technology. She writes in longhand and doesn't bother with cell phones, except in her car _ "in case I have a flat."But she needed no persuading when Simon & Schuster called her _ at home _...

WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST-SELLERSFICTION1. "Simple Genius" by David Baldacci (Grand Central Publishing)2. "The Children of Hurin" by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin)3. "The Woods" by Harlan Coben (Dutton Adult)4. "Body Surfing" by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown and Company)5. "The Good Husband of...