Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Shepard's third short story collection, encompasses eleven narratives, each set in a different time and place, including: the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, an outpost in Britannia in the late Roman empire, a Nazi expedition in Tibet, high-school-football-mad contemporary Texas, an 1840 expedition to the center of Australia, ancient Greece at the battle of Marathon, and Paris during the reign of terror that followed the French Revolution. Previous collections have featured similarly diverse settings and characters, meticulously researched and convincingly portrayed.

Saudi Arabia is inching toward opening itself up to the film biz with the creation of the conservative kingdom's first official film fest, despite the fact that cinemas have been banned there for three decades. Five-day fest, as-yet-untitled, is being organized by the government-sponsored Dammam Literary Club along with the Saudi Society of Arts and Culture.

Event will unspool May 20 and include screenings of shorts and docs from around the Gulf. A prize dubbed the Palm will be awarded to best short and doc. The Dammam Literary Club has been hosting select, private screenings to segregated audiences of men and women in recent months in a sign that the ban's restrictions are being gently eased.

The new fest comes on the back of a number of baby steps introduced in Saudi Arabia to pave the way for the eventual lifting of the cinema ban, initially introduced towards the tail-end of the 1970s following pressure from religious authorities. In October 2005, the first public screenings of any kind in over 20 years took place when a selection of cartoons were shown in a hotel in Riyadh to a specially invited audience of women and children to celebrate the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Three years ago James Patterson, the creator of the blockbuster best-selling Alex Cross and "Women's Murder Club" series, began "Maximum Ride," a series for young adults about a group of genetically mutated kids who are part human, part bird. The idea, he said, was to get children to love reading - or at least to love reading his kind of books. Two of the books in Mr. Patterson's "Maximum Ride" series.

Of the three installments to date, there are about 4.8 million copies in print, according to the publisher, Little, Brown & Company. Despite the kind of numbers that would make most authors beam, Mr. Patterson - who has an estimated 150 million copies of his books in print worldwide, and whose adult novels typically outsell his young-adult titles by two or three to one -- wants to sell more. A lot more. Now, with a new volume, Maximum Ride: The Final Warning, going on sale next month, Mr. Patterson figures the best way to get young readers may be through their mothers.

"The reality is that women buy most books," he said in a telephone interview. "The reality is that it's easier, and a really good habit, to start to get parents when they walk into a bookstore to say, 'You know, I should buy a book for my kid as well.'"

As a result, Little, Brown has asked booksellers to commit to keeping the new Maximum Ride book - along with The Dangerous Days of Daniel X, the first title in a new young-adult series, due out in July -- at the front of their stores as long as Mr. Patterson's adult titles usually stay there, in the hope of luring more adult buyers.

Janice N. Harrington's "Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone," a debut collection, received the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Administered by Claremont Graduate University, based in Claremont, Calif., the awards were established in the early 1990s by Kate Tufts in honor of her late husband, poet Kingsley Tufts. Previous winners include Alan Shapiro, Carl Phillips and Michael Ryan.

"I've seen cops walk through blood. I've seen them leave their own fingerprints on a window," Cornwell said in an interview Friday. "I've seen bloody clothing put in a plastic bag, instead of a paper bag, so it decomposes."

Her funding will help start the Crime Scene Academy at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, set to open this fall with training in DNA typing, fingerprint enhancement techniques, ballistics and forensic psychology.

The 51-year-old author has written more than a dozen books featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. Her latest is Book of the Dead.

Oil paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet were stolen in broad daylight on Sunday from the private Buehrle Collection in the second dramatic art theft in the area within days. "This is the biggest robbery in Switzerland in an art museum and one of the biggest art robberies in Europe," said Peter Rueegger, head of investigations for the Zurich police.

Three men in dark clothing and masks, one of whom spoke German with a Slavic accent, forced their way into the museum and made off with the paintings in a white car, police said. A reward of 100,000 Swiss francs was on offer for information leading to their arrest, police added. Rueegger said the Zurich robbery could be compared to the theft of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's "The Scream" from the Munch Museum in Oslo nearly four years ago. That work was recovered in 2006.

The robbery in Switzerland's financial capital follows the theft of two Picasso paintings -- Tete de Cheval, from 1962, and Verre et Pichet, from 1944 -- from a nearby cultural centre last week. They said it was possible a white vehicle had also played a role in this incident and that they would investigate whether the two thefts were connected. The four paintings stolen were Cezanne's "The Boy in the Red Vest" from 1890, Degas' "Viscount Lepic" and His Daughters from 1871, Monet's "Poppies Near Vetheuil" from 1880 and Van Gogh's "Blossoming Chestnut Branches" from 1890, police said.

The Union-Guilde des Scenaristes (UGS) has teamed up with the Ile de France Film Commission to launch the Script Market, a website aimed at selling French scripts to international producers, directors and actors. Project was unveiled before an audience comprised mostly of European and American producers during a breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Monday. "We want to develop our talents and develop them with overseas producers in order to (make) films that are local stories rooted in France with an international appeal," said Jerome Soubeyrand, UGS co-president.

The website fits the commission's agenda to attract more overseas productions to shoot in France. The Gallic organization is also planning to team with the French Alliance Marseilles Provence to centralize its marketing strategy and coordinate shoots, since so many foreign productions are filmed in both regions.

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Luc Besson's project to build a full-service production facility in the Parisian suburb of Seine St. Denis is also expected to attract international productions. The commission hopes their push to get the French government to offer foreign shoots bigger tax breaks will help them compete globally.

He worried about how his 1977 song "All I Want Is You" would be featured in the then-newly released "Juno" -- and whether more than 30 years as a children's author and entertainer would be tarnished by a momentary mocking of his work on the big screen.

As it turns out, that "Juno" spot has garnered the Silver Spring, Md., resident more mainstream attention than any previous milestone, which included playing at the White House and hosting a nationally syndicated children's show.

Polisar's MySpace page, which had 15,000 hits before the release of the film, has had about 150,000 since. Visitors have downloaded "All I Want Is You" from the page nearly 30,000 times. His song is referenced on Google 7,900 times and has been featured on YouTube.

What's more, eight couples from around the country have contacted Polisar requesting permission to use his song during their wedding -- including two couples from California who offered to fly him out to sing it.

"It's a real eye-opener what national exposure can do," said Polisar, 53, still amazed at how one motion picture has made a contemporary hit of a song that he released when Jimmy Carter was president.