"East of the Mountains," David Guterson's follow-up to "Snow Falling on Cedars," is polished, heartwarming, civic-minded -- and devoid of mystery.

George Stephanopoulos's odyssey from star-struck, ambitious young politico to older, wiser, much richer pundit is an emblematic generational story -- not in a good way.

Dorothy had ruby slippers; Monica had presidential knee pads. Dorothy had the wicked witch; Monica had Linda Tripp. Guess who the wizard is.

New novels by Hanif Kureishi and Chimo are attractively slender -- the book as accesory -- but there's less there than meets the eye.

Out of old-fashioned Irish literary stock -- crazy father, long-suffering mother, many restless children -- Emer Martin makes a modern, fast-paced (if slightly woolly) novel.

Norman Podhoretz's memoir of bare-knuckle intellectuals is good, trashy reading -- Jerry Springer by another name.

For a few hundred pages of his new novel, Bret Ellis makes art out of vacuous night crawlers and brand names. Then -- too bad -- he tries to make a point.

An anthology spanning 50 years of Gore Vidal's smart, gossipy, opinionated prose reveals this acerbic writer -- whatever literary form he chooses -- as a people person.

In "Bech at Bay," John Updike takes aim at German tourists and literary-world pomposity, among other targets. He's a good shot -- but they're still fish in a barrel.

Philip Roth revisits the Red-scare fifties and finds the same old stories of passion and disillusionment -- but told in rhetoric that's a weird American poetry.