"I recorded it at an old, abandoned dog-food factory," Dosen recounts. "It was terribly, terribly haunted; a bunch of people had been buried in the silos when they were building the place. There were ghosts in all the rooms, things flying off the walls, we heard weird voices and noises on some of the tracks. So everyone said: 'Why don't you start singing your songs to the ghosts and calm them down?'

Dosen admits it sounds strange - "I know it sounds completely wacky" - but, you get the feeling that strange is her way. "I'm kind of a random person: I follow little white rabbits down holes," she says. "I let the thing be what it is. I let things grow. I'm very much a gardener, I'm not a builder. I don't construct things, I just sow seeds and let things grow, out of my control."

Such strangeness befits someone who grew up on a peacock farm in rural Wisconsin. After "learning to sing by aping Olivia Newton-John," a six-year-old Dosen started writing songs, on a plastic Shaun Cassidy guitar, "for the swans in the pond".

International travelers concerned about being labeled a terrorist or drug runner by secret Homeland Security algorithms may want to be careful what books they read on the plane. Newly revealed records show the government is storing such information for years.

Privacy advocates obtained database records showing that the government routinely records the race of people pulled aside for extra screening as they enter the country, along with cursory answers given to U.S. border inspectors about their purpose in traveling. In one case, the records note Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore's choice of reading material, and worry over the number of small flashlights he'd packed for the trip.

The breadth of the information obtained by the Gilmore-funded Identity Project (using a Privacy Act request) shows the government's screening program at the border is actually a "surveillance dragnet," according to the group's spokesman Bill Scannell.

"There is so much sensitive information in the documents that it is clear that Homeland Security is not playing straight with the American people," Scannell said. The documents show a tiny slice of the massive airline-record collection stored by the government, as well as the screening records mined for the controversial Department of Homeland Security passenger-rating system that assigns terrorist scores to travelers entering and leaving the country, including U.S. citizens.

Known for its epic sweep, intricate plotting and large cast of complex characters, the [Wheel of Time] series centers on Rand al'Thor, a humble messianic figure who must stave off the forces of evil that threaten to overtake the faraway land in which he lives. Along the way, there are perils and portents, fair maidens, fantastical deeds and the like.

In an essay in The New York Times Book Review in 1996, Edward Rothstein wrote, "Even a reader with literary pretensions can be swept up in Mr. Jordan's narrative of magic, prophecy and battle." The "Wheel of Time" books have often been compared to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien in terms of their ability to exert a magnetic hold on readers. Translated into more than 20 languages, the books have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, according to Mr. Rigney's publisher.

*****

James Oliver Rigney Jr. was born in Charleston on Oct. 17, 1948. He served as an Army helicopter gunner in Vietnam, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross and Bronze Star, among other honors. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from the Citadel in 1974, and afterward worked as a nuclear engineer in Charleston before beginning a full-time writing career in the late 1970s. Mr. Rigney is survived by his wife, the former Harriet Popham McDougal; a son, William Popham McDougal of Housatonic, Mass.; and a brother, Reynolds W. Rigney of New Orleans.

Last week, we hear, agent Ellen Levine at Trident Media closed a deal for a postapocalyptic vampire trilogy with editor Mark Tavani at Ballantine. Now, if we reported on every postapocalyptic vampire trilogy out there, we'd never have time to write anything else. But this postapocalyptic vampire trilogy sold, we hear, for a whopping $3.75 million for North American rights. Impressively, the deal was made off a 400-page partial manuscript. And even more impressively -- given how cynical most of the people we know in the book world are -- everyone seems to really like the book.

*****

The story, set in 2016, revolves around a U.S. government project gone awry that affects a group of experimental subjects — condemned inmates plucked from death row — turning them into highly infectious vampires. Meanwhile, an orphan named Amy discovers that she has unusual powers, seemingly related to the crisis that quickly overtakes civilized society. It's pretty dark, though not completely without humor -- the governor of Texas in 2016, for example, is Jenna Bush.

But after the book's inaccuracies were exposed, Ms. Winfrey angrily grilled Mr. Frey on national television. He was apologetic and his publisher added a disclaimer to later editions of the book in which the author acknowledged embellishing his story.

Mr. Frey's memoir touched off a broader debate about the blurring of lines between works of fiction and nonfiction, particularly in the field of memoir-writing. It also called into question how much responsibility publishers have for assuring that their nonfiction titles are factually correct.

HarperCollins Publishers says that it will release Mr. Frey's "Bright Shiny Morning," a novel set in Southern California, in the summer of 2008 through its Harper imprint. "There will be a lively media response to the book, but we're publishing it because it is an extraordinary piece of work," said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of the Harper imprint. "He has a huge number of fans. They will come readily and eagerly to this novel, which is emotionally powerful."

As a reader, I love mystery and suspense novels, and of course horror and fantasy as well, but what I like best is when something doesn't fit comfortably in any of those categories. My favorite mystery novels have something in common with my favorite fantasy or horror novels, I think, which is that they're about characters who are forged and changed and driven by their environment.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy horror novels. I do. I think horror is the most versatile genre, because within its parameters you can write so many different kinds of stories. What bores me is when people write horror but confine themselves only to one kind of horror story--the typical story, the one everyone else is writing. The same can be said for fantasy and mystery.

Now, I have things I want to do with mystery and suspense novels in the future, and I wrote a ten book teen thriller series called Body of Evidence that has no supernatural elements at all. But horror is about fear, and fear is often fear of monsters (fear of the unknown) or fear of monstrosity (which could be the behavior of ourselves or others, or of physical monstrosity in ourselves our others). If that's the sort of horror that appeals to me, you could take that thread and follow it all the way through much of what I like in suspense, mystery, fantasy, you name it. It's all very human. Sometimes I just like a good monster story, but horror is most effective to me when it explores grief or sorrow or hope--something intimate.

The deal paves the way for a steady influx of original material from top tier writers for the studio, in return for enhanced creative control and potentially vast paydays for the writer if the film gets made and strikes gold. The move by the group - whose members include Little Miss Sunshine Oscar winner Michael Arndt, as well as Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, the duo behind the upcoming Western 3:10 To Yuma, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale - comes at a dynamic juncture in the history of screenwriting.

Crisis talks are ongoing between the Writers Guild of America and the studios ahead of possible strike action in November. Meanwhile two similar writers' initiatives - the Writers Co-Op and the 139 Inc - were launched earlier this year. However neither of those deals went as far as the Writing Partners agreement. Under the terms of the deal, each of the nine writers - or each screenwriting pair - must provide Fox with an original screenplay within the next four years in return for a $300,000 (£150,000) advance fee. While the amount is lower than the fee which an A-list writer would ordinarily expect to receive, things only get better if the film gets made.

In this case the writer not only receives the full lucrative fee but "back end" profit participation that amounts to 2.5% of ticket sales. These terms in particular have caused a stir in Tinseltown given Fox's reputation for fiscal conservatism. The studio cannot hire new writers for script polishes without the say-so of the original writer, who retains a strong influence on the choice of directors and actors. If the film does not get made, the script reverts to the writer and the full fee remains unpaid.

Madeleine L'Engle, 88, a prolific author whose best-known novel, "A Wrinkle in Time," won the top prize for children's literature and was considered among the most enigmatic works of fiction ever created, died Sept. 6 at Rose Haven nursing home in Litchfield, Conn. The cause of death was not disclosed by the family, but she reportedly had a cerebral hemorrhage in recent years. "A Wrinkle in Time," published in 1962, won the American Library Association's Newbery Medal for best children's book. It went through more than 60 printings, was adapted for television and other media and helped establish Ms. L'Engle among the best-selling children's authors of her generation.

Yet "children's author" did not begin to describe the breadth of her output, which included more than 50 books of adult fiction and nonfiction, poetry, plays and many volumes of memoirs. Reviewers noted a timeless quality in her best fiction, which blended themes of adolescent pain, spiritual and emotional insight, ethical decision-making and, above all, adventure and entertainment. Ms. L'Engle was a veteran author by the time "A Wrinkle in Time" was published, and the book cemented her reputation as a major literary figure. The novel weaved together aspects of theology and quantum physics and featured a female protagonist, which was unusual at the time.

*****

Ms. L'Engle tried to sell "A Wrinkle in Time" to a dozen publishers before Farrar, Straus and Giroux agreed -- with the caveat that the author should not expect much public reaction. She, in turn, had it written in her contract that the company could have the rights to the book forever, anywhere in the universe, except the Andromeda galaxy. "A Wrinkle in Time" was an instant sensation and attracted critical praise that culminated in the Newbery.

A Polish author, travel writer and intellectual whose best-selling novel described a grisly murder has been jailed for 25 years for committing the crime he had so vividly portrayed. The killing of Dariusz Janiszewski in 2000 was notably gruesome. The victim - a successful, popular professional - was humiliated, starved and tortured, before having his hands bound with a rope that was looped around his neck in a noose. When fishermen scooped the body out of the river Oder, it was stripped to shirt and underpants and the limbs had been distended and bore marks of torture. The police had no leads and after six months the search for a culprit was abandoned.

But the murderer could not resist gloating over his cleverness. During the investigation, anonymous emails were sent from South Korea and Indonesia to Polish television's equivalent of Crimewatch, describing the killing as "the perfect crime". Those were just straws in the wind. But fully five years after the killing, the detective in charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Jacek Wroblewski, received an anonymous call suggesting he take a look at a novel entitled Amok, written by Krystian Bala and published two years earlier.

Chief Inspector Wroblewski read the book several times. The similarities with the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski were too strong to be ignored. In the book, a group of bored intellectuals finds distraction from the monotony of their lives in sex, drugs, alcohol and murder. Their victim is first tortured, then has her hands and wrists bound with a length of rope that is then passed round her neck.

Details of the Janiszewski murder that were never publicised were duplicated in the novel. The victim's body was dragged from a river in Wroclaw. The Oder, where Mr Janiszewski was found, flows through the city. After Bala's arrest in 2005, friends and supporters launched appeals on the Web, claiming he had been "kidnapped and physically abused" by police and falsely accused of murder.

*****

Investigators found the victim's mobile phone had been sold on the internet four days after his disappearance, from an account in Bala's name. The author had no answer to that.

Hyperion is releasing that 705-page history, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, on Sept. 25, with a first printing of 300,000 copies, the publisher announced. The unusual promotional push will stretch from New York to La Jolla, Calif., Washington to Chicago, Milwaukee to Nashville.

At each engagement Mr. Halberstam's "surrogates," as Mr. Woodward calls them, will pay tribute to him, a best-selling author of books like The Best and the Brightest and Summer of '49, by offering personal reminiscences and readings. It took Mr. Halberstam 10 years to do the reporting and to write the book, which he called, in a term familiar to librarians and football fans, a "bookend" to his Pulitzer Prize-winning work on Vietnam. "It's a magnificent book," Mr. Woodward said of the new volume, partly because of the analogies drawn to the war in Iraq, he said, "the lessons of bad intelligence, no plan, the disconnect between the war as seen by the fighting man and headquarters." He added, "It carries an emotional power I didn't expect."

The idea for the tour was Hyperion's, said Mr. Halberstam's widow, Jean. "Then someone reminded me that when Tony Lukas died just after Big Trouble came out, David organized a number of writers to represent it in bookstores in the Boston area," she said. "David's friends, who are writers, are well aware that getting attention for a book is hard, no matter how well your last one did. They said, 'Whatever I can do — I'll fly to wherever.' He would have felt amazed and humbled, and that’s not necessarily a word used to describe him."

Dead Connection was to be a true-crime book. How did it become a novel featuring your new character, Ellie Hatcher?

A. Ellie's past grew out of my own experiences as a child in Wichita in the late 1970s. ... For years, people in this small Midwestern city were terrorized by the idea of a man who walked into houses in the light of day, cut the phone cords and then calmly called 911 when he was finished torturing and killing women and children.

When BTK resurfaced (years later), I wanted to write about the case, but I wasn't certain in what form. I eventually went so far as to contact (Rader's) lawyer to explore the possibility of an interview. In response, I received a handwritten letter from the defendant. From the letter's tone and content, it was clear to me that my interest in the case had made him feel important. I felt sick to my stomach. As a consequence, I decided not to get near a true-crime story with a 10-foot pole.

Instead, I took a hard look at what it was I really wanted to write about. It wasn't the details of that specific case but rather the tolls that such heinous crimes take upon the victims' survivors and, indeed, upon an entire city. I decided I could explore that through fiction, and specifically through Ellie Hatcher.