Paul West, a "prolific novelist, essayist and critic with an ornate prose style, who managed to write again after a severe stroke reduced his Shakespearean vocabulary to a single syllable," died Sunday, the New York Times reported. He was 85. West, who wrote more than 35 books, chronicled his illness in a 2008 memoir The Shadow Factory; as did his wife, author Diane Ackerman, in her 2011 book One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing.
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Harriet Klausner, a book reviewer and newspaper columnist who at one time was the #1 ranked reviewer on Amazon.com until the company changed its ranking system, died October 15. She was 63. A former librarian with a master's degree in library science, Klausner was proficient in speed-reading.
