"Cirque du Freak has all these twists and turns in the plot. It's almost like reading a video game."--Little, Brown editor Cindy Eagan on the challenges of attracting younger male readers, quoted yesterday in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article called "Books with an Edge Lure Younger Set."

Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, Richard Marsten, Hunt Collins, Curt Cannon, Ezra Hannon and John Abbott, died yesterday at 78. (Even Evan Hunter, his name for his literary fiction, which included The Blackboard Jungle, was adopted: he was born Salvatore Lombino.) Credited with creating the police procedural with the long-running 87th Precinct series set in a fictional Manhattan (Isola=island in Italian) under the Ed McBain name, Hunter also was a screenwriter and wrote the original screenplay of The Birds. Fiddlers, the 55th 87th Precinct book, will appear September 12.

On Morning Edition yesterday three booksellers—Rona Brinlee of the Book Mark, Atlantic Beach, Fla., Jake Reis of the Alabama Booksmith, Birmingham, Ala., and Lucia Silva of Portrait of a Bookstore, Studio City, Calif.—recommended titles for summer reading. Their picks ranged from Gods in Alabama, a novel by Joshilyn Jackson (Warner, $19.95) to Vacationland, poetry by Ander Monson (Tupelo Press, $16.95) to Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford (Crown, $24.95), among others.

Segun A. Afolabi, a former bookseller, has won the 2005 Caine Prize for African Writing, which comes with a $15,000 award. Originally from Nigeria and now living in London, Afolabi won for a short story called "Monday Morning" about a family of refugees in London. Jonathan Cape will publish a story collection by Afolabi next year and a novel by him in 2007.

Ingram Book Group has named Audrey Seitz v-p for merchandising. Before joining the company in 2001 as director of publisher and creative services, Seitz was v-p of marketing and merchandising at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.

Tamara Crabtree has been named v-p, publisher marketing and creative services. She joined Ingram in 2002 as director of product marketing and promotions and earlier worked in sales and marketing at Joseph-Beth and Gaylord Entertainment Co., where she was sales and promotions manager for the Grand Ole Opry and event manager for the Ryman Auditorium.

Beginning Monday, National Geographic and PBS present a three-hour miniseries based on the bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (Norton, $16.95). The author stars in the show, traveling around the world to investigate his thesis that societies developed at different rates for environmental rather than biological reasons. Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, $29.95), published late last year, continues to be a sales success.

Tomorrow's Early Show hosts Edna Buchanan, whose Shadows (S&S, $24) features characters introduced in Cold Case Squad.
 
The theme on Bookworm today is Sexuality and Literary Theory, a subject that 
James McCourt, Camille Paglia, Alan Hollinghurst and Edmund White dig into. McCourt discusses the emergence of "queer identity" and gives an overview of French literary theories and their influence on multiculturalism. Paglia articulates what she calls the destructive nature of such theories. Booker-winner Hollinghurst, who writes about the gay experience, reveals that he reads very little popular gay literature. Edmund White says that he has turned away from the esthetic and has embraced social realism in his desire to document the AIDS crisis.

Today Diane Rehm talks with John Sacret Young, the co-creator, writer and executive producer of China Beach, the TV series about Vietnam, who has published Remains: Non-Viewable (FSG, $24), a memoir of how the death of his cousin in Vietnam affected his life and shaped him as a writer.

Today Leonard Lopate speaks with James Frey, author of My Friend Leonard (Riverhead, $24.95)—not about Lopate, but about a mobster Frey met in rehab.

Yesterday on Talk of the Nation, a panel talked about getting the nation's young to read more; their ideas can be heard—but not read—on NPR's Web site. The experts:

• Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheeseman and The Time Warp Trio series.
• Paul Kropp, author of How to Make Your Child a Reader For Life and other books for reluctant readers.
• Esme Raji Codell, author of How to Get Your Child to Love Reading and creator of PlanetEsme.com, a Web site devoted to kids and reading
• Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.

The Dallas Morning News profiles the unusual West Texas town of Marfa, which has become a haven for creative and wealthy people from the coasts and Texas cities. Among the signs of the town's makeover: art galleries, excellent restaurants and a "world-class bookstore," Marfa Book Co., which was founded in 1999 and has a coffee/wine bar and art gallery.

Louis Dobay, manager of the store, which has a striking Web site, told the paper, "Newcomers are definitely changing Marfa. But the newcomers are also being changed by the spirit of the people of Marfa. There is a gentility and openness in the way people live here, something that springs from the residents who have been here for generations."

Book TV airs all weekend on C-Span 2 and features political and historical nonfiction and information about the book world. For more information, go to Book TV's Web site. Programming for this coming weekend includes:

Saturday, July 9

7 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment originally aired in 1997, Geoffrey Perret discussed his book Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier and President.

Sunday, July 10

6 p.m. After Words. Bob Woodward, whose The Secret Man appeared this week, is interviewed by James Mann, senior writer-in-residence in the Center for Strategic and International Studies' International Security Program and a former colleague of Woodward at the Washington Post. (Re-airs at 9 p.m.)

8 p.m. History on Book TV. Melanie Randolph Miller talked about her book Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution (Potomac Books).

9:10 p.m. Public Lives. In an event that took place at Karibu Bookstore in Hyattsville, Md., Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers, and Columbia professor Manning Marable, who together edited The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (Basic Civitas, $26), spoke about the assassinated civil rights leader.

Already made into a popular 1985 movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, The Color Purple by Alice Walker (Harvest, $14) will soon appear on Broadway as a musical, opening for previews on October 25. The musical made its debut in Atlanta last fall and received favorable reviews.

Yesterday Wall Street Journal "Déjà Vu" columnist Cynthia Crossen noted that a column she wrote June 2, 2004, about historical fiction received more mail from readers than any other subject she has covered. "I didn't realize it was controversial to suggest that good fiction can animate history in a way textbooks too often fail to do," she wrote, "but apparently it is."

In her earlier column she recommended 10 works of historical fiction. Yesterday, perhaps adding gasoline to the fire, she recommended another five and commented on each:

• Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks. An imaginative retelling of the story of the abolitionist John Brown and the antislavery movement of the 1840s, Cloudsplitter meticulously details the social and political schisms of the period, as well as the privations of daily life in rural America. Mr. Banks's meditations on faith, particularly John Brown's conviction that God opposed slavery, are moving and relevant.
• The New Confessions by William Boyd. The fictional memoir of John James Todd, born in Edinburgh in 1899 and a lifelong victim of historical forces—World War I, the McCarthy witch hunt—as well as his own character flaws. He finds a kind of intellectual sustenance in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions.
• World's End by T.C. Boyle. In the Hudson River Valley in the late 17th century, Dutch settlers elbowed aside the Native American residents and then divided themselves between yeomen and patroons. Everyone, regardless of class, is royally skewered in this offbeat account of the following three centuries.
• The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston. The hero of this Newfoundland saga rises from rags to not-quite riches, and falls in love/hate with Sheilagh Fielding, one of the most interesting female characters in 20th-century literature.
• Restoration by Rose Tremain. Pick up any of her novels for ingenious plots and characters, but this account of the reign of England's King Charles II, as seen through the eyes of the court's official cuckold (he marries the king's mistress), is riveting, harrowing and liberally sprinkled with humor.