sports columnist Jackie MacMullan tells the whole story behind basketball’s greatest all-time rivalry

Anybody who followed basketball in the 1980s knows about the heated personal rivalry between Larry Bird and Earvin “Magic” Johnson. But even long-time sports columnist Jackie MacMullan, who covered sports for The Boston Globe for 25 years, was surprised to learn how deep that rivalry ran.  

best-selling author and Seacoast resident Joe Hill unveils new book in Portsmouth

Joe Hill traveled through a fierce snowstorm to find a patient crowd of several dozen fans, many of them wearing plastic, light-up devil horns to celebrate the launch of "Horns." Hill described his new novel as a supernatural thriller. “It’s also a really, really filthy book,” he warned the crowd at RiverRun.

by Andre Dubus III
W.W. Norton & Company, 1999, 365 pages

In “House of Sand and Fog,” the central characters all have reasonable goals and desires, but they all confront problems that are largely beyond their control.

His fans say no one understands Boston’s criminal underside like Chuck Hogan, author of several acclaimed novels, including “The Standoff” and “Prince of Thieves,” which won the 2005 Hammett Award, was called one of the 10 best novels of the year by Stephen King, and is soon to be made into a major motion picture called “The Town.”

‘Sisters in War’ author Christina Asquith is on her way to the Seacoast

Within a matter of months after the U.S. military toppled Saddam Hussein, elation turned to terror as a deadly opposition movement arose against American forces and their allies.

Women who interacted with foreign soldiers or worked for the Americans received death threats. Islamic fundamentalists took command of many villages and imposed their social beliefs, forcing women to wear veils and consent to arranged marriages. Women who violated their strict laws were publicly whipped or beheaded.

“Under Saddam, the more fervent Islamic believers were kept at bay,” Iraq war journalist Christina Asquith says. “Once he was gone, I don’t think the Americans were prepared at all for this really fervent rise in Shia Islamism.”

by Jeffrey Eugenides, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993, 256 pages

“The Virgin Suicides” marked a breathtaking debut for Jeffrey Eugenides, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction with “Middlesex.” The only important question he leaves unanswered is “why?” What would lead five perfectly healthy, radiantly beautiful, precociously intelligent young women to take their own lives?

The author of “The Piano Teacher,” a New York Times bestseller, was born in Hong Kong to Korean parents and attended an international school there. Janice Y.K. Lee said she was already comfortable with American culture by the time she got to St. Paul’s School in Concord.

What Lee remembers most about adjusting to New Hampshire after having lived in Hong Kong till the age of 15 is not a culture shock, but the cold.

Michael Scammell discusses his new biography of Arthur Koestler 

Michael Scammell's biography of Arthur Koestler, published by Random House in December, was two decades in the making. A professor at Columbia University, his work was mostly confined to summers, winter breaks and sabbaticals. By his count, his research took him to 14 different countries. But he did much of the writing here on the Seacoast, at his part-time home in Dover.

Library sharing reaches record high

The State Library Bookmobile began in 1938 to help small, rural libraries supplement their collections. Today, it couriers half a million books, movies, music and periodicals around the state each year.

Local booksellers scour the shelves and share their best finds of 2009, with locals and bestsellers alike. Fiction goes for a walk with Jesus on a New Hampshire beach, while nonfiction takes readers to Iraq, Burundi and the Middle East.

two poets to read in Portsmouth

Local poet Elizabeth Kirschner and Boston poet Wendy Mnookin will read from their newest books at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth on Thursday, Aug. 20 at 7 p.m.

Kirschner’s most recent collection is called “Surrender to Light.” She has published five volumes of poetry, including “My Life as a Doll,” which has been nominated for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She has also collaborated with many classical composers and has work featured on several CDs, including “The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons.” She lives in Kittery Point, Maine, and sponsors a mentorship program called Wise Eye: Creating Poetry That Soars. 

Pulitzer Prize winner reading in Exeter

Richard Russo, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Empire Falls,” will read at the Exeter Town Hall on Wednesday, Aug. 19 at 7 p.m.

Water Street Bookstore has arranged for the Camden, Maine, resident to read and sign his newest book, “That Old Cape Magic,” released this month. It is a novel of deep introspection on family connections and emotions, with a middle-aged man confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own troubled one, and his daughter’s new life. He also examines what it was he thought he wanted and what, in fact, he has.

by Howard Norman,
Picador, 1994
289 pages

Fabian Vas, the narrator and protagonist of Howard Norman’s 1994 novel “The Bird Artist,” reveals two key personal details within the book’s opening paragraph. First, he explains that he is, as the title suggests, a bird artist. He makes a modest living drawing the native species of the small fishing community where he resides, sketching ibises, ospreys, sandpipers, kittiwakes, mallards, garganeys and even his least favorite bird, the cormorant.

The second detail has a more confessional tone: “Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself,” Fabian explains in the fifth sentence.  

Few beginnings could be more enticing than this. What could have possibly compelled this seemingly gentle bird artist with whom we’ve so recently become acquainted to murder the lighthouse keeper? With this question tingling in our brains, we read on, and Norman obligingly unfolds the tale.