Percival Everett’s “James,” his acclaimed retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is a fiction nominee for the National Book Awards.

Pope John Paul I is widely recalled not so much for his life but for the murky circumstances of his abrupt death, 33 days after being elected pontiff in 1978, Now, admirers of the so-called "smiling pope” are using his approaching beatification to focus on the accomplishments of the pope instead of the intrigue surrounding his demise at age 65 which spawned best-sellers alleging he was poisoned or his health was neglected by detractors in the Vatican.

Scuba divers at Lake Tahoe are sorting through their haul after an unprecedented, yearlong effort to remove litter from the alpine lake's entire 72 miles of shoreline atop the Sierra Nevada.

This week’s new entertainment releases include Camila Cabello's third album, a documentary about the life of professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, and Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe starring in “Tokyo Vice,” a HBO Max crime drama.

New paperback editions of “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” and other fiction by the late Oscar Hijuelos will be published over a 2-year period starting in 2023.

A recent Wyoming school board meeting was yet again packed with opponents of mask mandates when things took an abrupt turn and a parent started reading out sexually explicit passages from a book available in school libraries.

FILE - Actor Hal Holbrook appears during an interview in his New York apartment on Feb. 8, 1973. Holbrook died on Jan. 23 in Beverly Hills, California, his representative, Steve Rohr, told The Associated Press Tuesday. Holbrook died on Jan. 23 in Beverly Hills, California, his representative, Steve Rohr, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. Holbrook’s material is uproarious, his ability to hold an audience by acting is brilliant,” said The New York Times. AdWhen he wasn’t portraying Twain, Holbrook showed impressive versatility.

NEW YORK – Two of crime fiction's most famous storytellers, Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, also knew how to get a laugh. According to Tony Medawar, producer of the International Agatha Christie Festival (in Devon, England), Christie likely drew upon her own childhood in setting a playful atmosphere, with the kids showing proper irreverence for the supposedly world famous detective. “Christmas Adventure" also is appearing in the upcoming Christie collection “Midwinter Murder,” which comes out Oct. 20. "‘Christmas Adventure’ is a particularly light-hearted story," Medawar says. Chandler's employer guide, according to Chandler scholar Dr. Sarah Trott, was likely written in the early 1950s, when Chandler hired a private secretary, Juanita Messick.

FILE - In this Oct. 10, 2016 file photo, author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie appears at a celebration of Indigenous Peoples' Day at Seattle's City Hall. Alexie is included in a list of authors who wrote books that were among the 100 most subjected to censorship efforts over the past decade, as compiled by the American Library Association. All wrote books that were among the 100 most subjected to censorship efforts over the past decade, as compiled by the American Library Association. The association does not formally count the number of times books are actually removed from a library shelf or from a school reading list. “There are actually two lines of objections to the Anne Frank diary,” Caldwell-Stone says.