It would be unfair to label John Banville a "writer's writer," because it would suggest he is not a writer easily accessible to the majority of readers. Yet, there is no doubt that Banville's work has attracted much critical opinion emphasizing the autho...

John Banville is the most interesting and resourceful Irish novelist of his generation. A writer who has let his published work do most of his talking for him, he has done more than most of his contemporaries to challenge accepted ideas of what might con...

The Odd Sea. By Frederick Reiken. Harcourt Brace. 201 pages. $22. Happy families are not all alike, and the strength of Frederick Reiken's sensitive first novel, "The Odd Sea," resides in its portrayal of a family coping with loss. Reiken who lives...

William Styron's daughter Alexandra debuts with All the Finest Girls (Little, Brown, $23.95), a hauntingly grim, angry novel about a seriously dysfunctional, "love handicapped" family. Her narrator, Adelaide Abraham, is the withdrawn, difficult only child of a well- to-do bit-part actress and a bitter...

The competition between protected sea lions gobbling Columbia River salmon and impatient humans with empty fishing lines has led to vigilante action.A fisherman shot a sea lion who stole a salmon off the line of a fellow angler Wednesday at a popular fishing spot near...