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Umberto Eco started working a novel that set the world's imagination on fire "prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk." The Italian author and academic who intrigued, puzzled and delighted readers worldwide with his best-selling medieval thriller, "The Name of the Rose," died at home in Milan on Friday evening after a battle with cancer, according to a family member who asked not to be identified.

British thriller writer Frederick Forsyth revealed he had conducted missions for intelligence service MI6 in extracts from his autobiography published Sunday. Forsyth, whose bestsellers include "The Day Of The Jackal", told of how he had assisted Britain's overseas spying agency in the Nigerian region of Biafra, East Germany, Rhodesia and South Africa. While working as a journalist in 1968, he was approached by an MI6 man called "Ronnie" who wanted "an asset deep inside the Biafran enclave" where there was a civil war between 1967 and 1970.

The priest who was the inspiration for Chesterton's great detective also played a central role in the conversion of Chesterton and many others Crime fiction fans are well aware of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and his place in the Pantheon of great detectives. Nevertheless, in contrast with the seemingly endless speculation as to the ‘real Sherlock Holmes’, there has been little such debate about the origin of the priest sleuth. However, a recent book, The Elusive Father Brown (Gracewing, 2010), by Laura Smith, goes some way to rectifying this, detailing as it does the life of the cleric who formed...

Harlan Ellison is still an angry young man, except he'll be 81 on May 27. He has used this anger, fueled by childhood anti-Semitism, throughout his extraordinary career as a writer of speculative fiction. This year saw the publication of his 116th and 117th (so far) books: The Top of the Volcano, a collection of his awardwinning short stories, and a graphic novelization of his original script for "The City on the Edge of Forever," widely considered the best Star Trek episode ever written. Although Ellison's hundreds of published stories contain a wealth of Jewish characters, his most complex creation...

On May 27, the American novelist Herman Wouk will attain the prodigious age of 100. Over his long career, Wouk has achieved all the wealth and fame a writer could desire, or even imagine. His first great success, The Caine Mutiny (1951), occupied bestseller lists for two consecutive years, sold millions of copies, and inspired a film adaptation that became the second highest-grossing movie of 1954. Wouk’s grand pair of novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, likewise found a global audience, both in print, and then as two television miniseries in the 1980s. Wouk won a Pulitzer...

Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld comic fantasy series of novels, has died aged 66. Publishers Transworld announced the news “with immeasurable sadness”. Managing director Larry Finlay, said: “The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds.” The author of more than 70 books died at his home “with his cat sleeping on his bed, surrounded by his family” earlier on Thursday. Pratchett, who had early onset Alzheimer’s disease, leaves his wife, Lyn, and their daughter, Rhianna. He had, said Finlay “enriched the planet like few before him”.

High court to hear gay marriage cases in April Associated Press WASHINGTON (January 16, 2015) — Setting the stage for a potentially historic ruling, the Supreme Court announced Friday it will decide whether same-sex couples have a right to marry everywhere in America under the Constitution. The justices will take up gay-rights cases that ask them to overturn bans in four states and declare for the entire nation that people can marry the partners of their choice, regardless of gender. The cases will be argued in April, and a decision is expected by late June. Proponents of same-sex marriage said...

The phrase has become slippery. “Christian writer.” What does it mean? For some the phrase plays like a favorite old song, an evocation of the glory days of Greene, Waugh, Percy, O’Connor, et alia. Days long gone and sorely missed. For others “Christian writer” may spell an oxymoron, or at least refer to the kind of writer one would not like to meet at a Manhattan cocktail party. And for still others the phrase increasingly tends to serve as a signal that some exceptionally maudlin fiction is quivering like a bad cheese on the horizon. But even looking at the...

Are you looking for a spellbinding novel with deeply Catholic themes, compelling characters, and exquisite prose? Well, if you’ve been confining your search to Barnes and Noble’s family-friendly Christian fiction shelf, I’m here to tell you that you’re missing out. As a reader, you have probably heard of Dean Koontz. He has sold 450 million copies of his books in 38 languages, making him one of the most successful writers in the world. And while his stories have been categorized as science fiction, fantasy, thriller, and horror, he’s also considered by many readers to be the world’s best Catholic author...

Leftist Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua is saying that Israel should not refer to Hamas as a “terrorist organization” but as an “enemy”. In an opinion piece published in the New Republic magazine, Yehoshua wrote that Israel should give Hamas the status of a “legitimate enemy”. “What accounts for the fact that, after the retreat of Israel from the Gaza Strip, the departure from Israeli settlements and the transfer of authority to Hamas, we continue to characterize Gaza as a terrorist state rather than as an ‘enemy’?” he wrote. “Is it that the expression ‘a regime of terror’ is a stronger...

Peter Matthiessen, a roving author and naturalist whose impassioned nonfiction explored the remote endangered wilds of the world and whose prize-winning fiction often placed his mysterious protagonists in the heart of them, died on Saturday at his home in Sagaponack, N.Y. He was 86... Mr. Matthiessen was one of the last survivors of a generation of American writers who came of age after World War II and who all seemed to know one another, socializing in New York and on Long Island’s East End as a kind of movable literary salon peopled by the likes of William Styron, James Jones,...

Tom Clancy, whose complex, adrenaline-fueled military novels spawned a new genre of thrillers and made him one of the world’s best-known and best-selling authors, died on Tuesday in Baltimore. He was 66.

Author Richard Matheson has passed away at the age of 87. As this is breaking news, there are not a whole lot of details we can offer at this time, we'll update this spot as more information comes in but Matheson's daughter, Ali, wrote the following: "My beloved father passed away yesterday at home surrounded by the people and things he loved...he was funny, brilliant, loving, generous, kind, creative, and the most wonderful father ever...I miss you and love you forever Pop and I know you are now happy and healthy in a beautiful place full of love and joy...

Flynn self-published his first book, "Term Limits," in 1997 before landing a publishing deal. "Term Limits" became a New York Times bestseller. Most of his books centered on the character Mitch Rapp, a counterterrorism operative. He averaged a book a year.

Bestselling author Vince Flynn has died at 47-years-old after a lengthy battle with prostate cancer, local CBS affiliate WCCO reports. He died Wednesday morning at United Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, and leaves behind a wife and three children.

Minnesota author Vince Flynn has died after a long battle with prostate cancer. WCCO-TV has learned that Flynn died Wednesday morning at United Hospital in St. Paul. Flynn has authored 15 novels centered around the character of Mitch Rapp, an undercover CIA agent. The majority of those novels have made it to the New York Times bestseller list.

Mike Lofgren used to be a Republican. Then he “retired” last year – so he claims – from a staff job on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee doing grunt work for GOP lawmakers. Nowadays, Lofgren gets paid to bash the party of Lincoln (and Reagan), which has been taken over by the “religious right,” he laments, in his just-published, oh-so-cleverly-titled book, “The Party is Over.” “Religious cranks ceased to be a minor political nuisance in this country in the 1970s,” writes Lofgren, “and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file.” Today, he reckons, these “religious fundamentalists”...

Science fiction author Ray Bradbury sits in front of a photo of Mars, presented to him during an 83rd birthday party in his honor on Aug. 23, 2003. Ray Bradbury, master of the sci-fi fantasy and author of Fahrenheit 451, died Tuesday at 91.The man who chronicled dystopian societies had strong political beliefs and spoke as darkly about contemporary politics as he did about burning books. "I think our country is in need of a revolution," the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying in 2010. "There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be...

Ray Bradbury, the writer whose expansive flights of fantasy and vividly rendered space-scapes have provided the world with one of the most enduring speculative blueprints for the future, has died. He was 91. Bradbury's daughter confirmed his death to the Associated Press on Wednesday morning. She said her father died Tuesday night in Southern California. Author of more than 27 novels and story collections — most famously “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” — and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has frequently been credited with elevating the often maligned reputation of science...

Maurice Sendak, the renowned children's book author who revolutionized the genre, has died. He was 83. Sendak died on Tuesday from complications caused by a recent stroke, his editor told the New York Times. He lived in Ridgefield, Conn., and was hospitalized in nearby Danbury. According to the Associated Press, Sendak had suffered the stroke on Friday. Sendak wrote and illustrated more than 50 children's books--including "Where the Wild Things Are," his most famous, published in 1963.