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Gaiman's novel, first published in 1997 as Stardust: Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie, is set in a town in the English countryside where the magical and mortal mix. Story's centered on a young man who promises his beloved that he'll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm, where he has to contend with witches, goblins, gnomes, talking animals and evil trees.

Stardust, which won the 1999 Mythopoeic Award for adult novel, was originally set up at Dimension. The feature project's being developed with the goal of tapping into veins of fantasy and comedy akin to those in The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story.

Vintage has gone back to press three times with its movie tie-in edition. There are 130,000 books in print, which feature cover art from the original book and a sticker with a photo of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who stars as the flamboyant author in the film.

"Right now, sales of Capote's books are running 28% ahead of last year," says Lynne Widli of Barnes & Noble. "In Cold Blood was our top-selling literature title last week, outselling perennial favorites The Great Gatsby, 1984, Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies."

When first published in 1965, In Cold Blood was an instant sensation. Capote called his book, based on the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family, a "non-fiction novel." The movie, which opened in limited release Sept. 30, examines the author's relationship with the killers.

Capote the movie, however, is not based on the novel, but on Capote: A Biography, the critically acclaimed work by Gerald Clarke, first published in 1986 and also seeing a resurgence in interest. Publisher Carroll & Graf has printed 30,000 movie tie-in editions, and sales have increased 30% a week since early September, according to editor in chief Philip Turner. He expects an additional printing soon.

1. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction author of all time with an estimated two billion copies of her books in print. By comparison, around 270 million copies of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books have been sold.

2. Agatha is the most-translated fiction author in the world, according to the UNESCO. Her work has been translated into more than 70 languages. It is often said that she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.

3. She wrote 80 novels and short story collections and 19 plays. She also wrote two books of poetry, a children's book, and two autobiographical works.

4. Agatha penned six romance novels under the name of Mary Westmacott. This pseudonym remained a secret for almost 20 years until her nom de plume was revealed by the Sunday Times.

5. On average 97 per cent of adults in the UK know of Agatha Christie and one third have read at least one Christie novel; more than half have seen a Christie film.

6. Agatha managed to write an average of two novels a year through her working life.

7. For many years she set and corrected an essay competition for pupils of a local school.

8. She remains the most borrowed mystery author from Britain's public libraries and ranks as one of the top10 most borrowed authors, clocking up more than 12 million loans in the past ten years.

9. She is also the nation's favorite spoken book author. In 2002, 117,696 Christie audiobooks were sold, compared to 97,755 for JK Rowling, 78,770 for Roald Dahl and 75,841 for JRR Tolkein.

10. In 2000 Agatha Christie was voted Best Writer of the 20th Century and her Poirot books were named Best Series of the Century at the 31st Boucheron World Mystery Convention.

11. Her most famous play, The Mousetrap, is the longest continuously running play of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on November 25, 1952. It moved next door to the St. Martin's Theatre on March 25, 1974, not missing a single performance. It continues to this day. It was originally written as a 20-minute radio drama, commissioned by the BBC to celebrate the 80th birthday of Queen Mary.

Books are the new snobbery, according to a survey today. Social competitiveness about which titles we read has become one of the new mass forces of the era and only middle-aged people are relatively free of it. Driven partly by pressure from incessant literary prize shortlists, more than one in three consumers in London and the south-east admit having bought a book "solely to look intelligent", the YouGov survey says.

It finds one in every eight young people confessing to choosing a book "simply to be seen with the latest shortlisted title". This herd instinct dwindles to affect only one in 20 over-50 year-olds.

The British Airports Authority and the travel website Expedia, which jointly commissioned the poll of 2,100 people as a prelude to their own travel books prize ceremony on Tuesday, say it suggests snobbery is no longer just a matter of keeping up with the Joneses.

"The latest literary pressure is keeping up with the rest of your fellow travellers and commuters. Bookshelf contents are fast becoming as studied and planned as outfits as a way to impress others. Books shortlisted for prestigious literary panel awards are becoming 'de rigueur' reading for many."

"For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'."

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Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels?three, she thinks?could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."

To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship?some of which she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it?or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.

Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable."

She may have mastered the art of French cooking, but don't call amateur cook-turned-author Julie Powell a foodie. "Foodie to me implies being really taken with the trappings of the more elitist aspects of enjoying food, so I try to veer away from the term," she says.

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"It was very clear to me from the beginning that I couldn't just take the blog and plop it into a book form, because that would be excruciatingly boring," she says. But publisher Little, Brown (a division of Time Warner, as is CNN) had faith in her, even though it was the first time it had picked up a book based on a blog. Critics, however, have gotten snagged on the transformation. Some say the book is too, well, bloggy.

"'Julie and Julia' still has too much blog in its DNA: it has a messy, whatever's-on-my-mind incontinence to it, taking us places we'd rather not go," writes David Kamp of The New York Times. (Powell's disclosure that she sold her ova to pay off her credit card debt springs to mind.)

Jiang Rong's 2004 Chinese-language novel about the struggle for life on the Mongolian grasslands will be published in English in 2007, An Boshun, Jiang's agent with Changjiang Literary Art Press, told The Associated Press. "This is the biggest overseas book deal in mainland China," An said. He said Penguin also agreed to a 10 percent royalty on each book sold, almost double what is standard in China. "We talked with a lot of big international publishers, but Penguin offered a very good price and a concrete and satisfying plan to publish the book's English version globally."

Jo Lusby, Penguin's representative in Beijing, said interest from several publishing houses had pushed up the price for "The Wolf Totem," which has sold more than 1 million copies and topped best-seller lists for months. "It's a very unusual book. It's a book we believe in and are very excited about," Lusby said.

The meticulously researched, semiautobiographical tale is built around the lives of wolves told through the eyes of a student sent to work on the Inner Mongolian grasslands. It is set during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong emptied the cities of educated youths to have them work alongside peasants and herders.

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Despite his success, first-time author Jiang, 58, has largely avoided the media. A Beijing university professor who, like his protagonist, lived for several years in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang spent more than 30 years researching and writing the book.

We all love lists, but even I was surprised by how popular our TIME 100 list of the world's greatest movies turned out to be when it premiered on TIME.com in May. Compiled by our film critics, Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, the list has been viewed by millions of visitors, drawn cheers (thanks for including Sweet Smell of Success) and jeers (what happened to Gone With the Wind?) and still remains one of TIME.com's most clicked-on special features.

This week we introduce our TIME 100 list of the best novels on TIME.com and I expect the debates will be just as lively. There were only two ground rules. As with our film list, we picked 1923--when TIME began publishing--as our starting point. And we focused on books written in English. That's why there is no Ulysses (published in 1922) or One Hundred Years of Solitude (originally written in Spanish).

Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo, our book critics, reread many of the classics and discovered a few that they had never had a chance to read. There were some easy calls (The Sound and the Fury, Invisible Man, Herzog) and some not so easy (Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer did not make the cut, though both critics admire their essays and nonfiction books). Several authors appear twice, including William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. And one author on the list is actually a TIME alumnus: James Agee, who reviewed movies and books for the magazine in the 1940s and is represented by A Death in the Family.

I know the list will spark lots of discussions, but I hope it also sends you back to books you read with pleasure years ago as well as to books that you may not have heard of. I'd also love to hear what you think of our selections. I find almost all our critics' arguments persuasive, but I still feel John le Carré's best book is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (not on the list) instead of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (on the list). Oh, and one more thing: this time around, Gone With the Wind fans get their revenge. The film may not have made the movie list, but Margaret Mitchell's book makes this one.

Last week I wrote to you about our upcoming Book Forum, and I asked you which of the books on our list you'd prefer to read. Thousands of you voted, and we now have a winner!

The winning book is "God's Politics" by Jim Wallis, a discussion of politics and Christianity in America today. I've actually read some of this book already (it's very good), and I'm looking forward to finishing it, and to hearing your thoughts on it. Thank you for the great selection!

The Forum is open now, so be sure to pick up the book soon. When you receive the book, visit the Book Forum Page, which can be found on the One America web site.

During the last Forum, John and I read some profound insights on David Shipler's "The Working Poor." We're eager to see what you think about this one. Our community is lively and diverse; the conversation we strike up is sure to be informative and thought provoking. John and I are very much looking forward to it!

Thanks again for participating, and enjoy the read!

"It was very strange and smooth," Smith says in a low voice that sounds a tad like that of CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour. "I always feel very fraudulent if young writers ask me what they should do -- I have no idea. I don't know who you should send your manuscript to or whether you should do an MFA program. I'm clueless."

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Smith, who turns 30 this month, is in the home stretch of a three-week book tour, an exercise she finds absurd -- "you get tired of listening to yourself" -- but which, this time at least, was made less onerous by the presence of her husband, British poet Nick Laird. The couple met at Cambridge University when Smith was 18, and they share a life, she says, that isn't much different from their life as students: "We read and work and watch TV and eat."

*****

"I was sitting in Golden Gate Park with my husband today," Smith says. "We'd been to the Arboretum and we were reading and sitting on the grass. And I thought how incredibly lucky I am." She grins and then, as if to trick the gods who'd blessed her, she laughs and superstitiously adds, "I'm sure some terrible thing is about to happen to me to balance it all out."

Basking in high praise for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina and having stolen the spotlight from many of his competitors, CNN reporter Anderson Cooper has officially landed a book contract with HarperCollins, agent Luke Janklow told The Book Standard today.

The not-yet-written memoir was bought for $1 million by HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham, who will be editing the book himself, Janklow said, adding that Cooper will not be working with a ghostwriter. The book will "deal with the last year of [Cooper?s] life as a journalist and human being in Sri Lanka, Africa, Iraq and Louisiana/Mississippi," his agent said. Most of the proceeds will go to charity.

Everybody wants a piece of Warren Buffett. Now that the investment maharishi has agreed to have a hand in another financial advice book, publishers have eagerly rubbed their hands and leapt into a bidding war for the title. Stakes are now as high as $7 million--less than the $12 million advance paid to Bill Clinton for his memoir My Life, although unlike Clinton's 1,000-page tome, Warren's stream of consciousness will be penned by insurance analyst Alice Schroeder.

Schroeder is "the only one Warren Buffett will speak to," according to a Risk & Insurance biographical article, after the top analyst spent years following Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway. "I think she did a very thorough job," the article quoted Buffett as saying of her work. "It seems to me she varied from the standard approach of securities analysts."

Schroeder was a surprise for scuttlebutts, who had expected the billionaire guru--ranked No. 2 on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list--would write a book with Fortune's Carol Loomis. The latter's explanation for the snub: although a collaborative investment book had been on the cards, Loomis was put off by Buffett's aversion to do the required work. Which now puts Schroeder in a rather lucrative position. Along with her deep knowledge, she has staunchly defended Buffett's Berkshire as "the most talked about and the least understood company in the world."

"I?m a writer and this is what I love to do. There?s no reason that just because you?re a celebrity you can?t write," Estefan, known for hits like "Conga" and "Rhythm is Gonna Get You," told Reuters in a recent interview. "I?ve been offered a lot of things that celebrities do that I wouldn?t do, like perfumes, lines of clothing and this, that and the other," she said. "But this is right up my alley."

Estefan?s book stars a wide-eyed bulldog, wide-mouthed Dalmatians, bulbous goldfish and a few birds. "I?m totally animal-oriented," Estefan, 48, said. "I?ve got nine dogs, eight birds, turtles, fish and I had wallabies at one point."

It?s a familiar plot. Noelle the bulldog -- based on Estefan?s own bulldog from Colombia -- is not quite as fast as the Dalmatians, not as buoyant as the goldfish, not even luminous like the fireflies. But Noelle saves the day, managing in one afternoon to retrieve a tennis ball from under a car, return a jumping fish to water and fashion a stairway from cans of beans and sacks of flour to reach a bag of seeds for some hungry birds.

Estefan?s message is, "You don?t have to give up who you are to be successful just because you?re different." The caterpillar-turns-into-butterfly theme may be the oldest in children?s book history, but Estefan says it is heartfelt and mirrors her own experience moving to the United States from Cuba as a young Spanish-speaking child. "I was the only girl in class who spoke Spanish and the first word I learned was 'stupid' because that's what the kid next to me called me," Estefan said. "But within six months, I had won the reading award there."

[I]n the search for clues, "Lost" fans have latched onto every aspect of the show, from the numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42) a character named Hurley used to win the lottery back home, to a Spanish-language comic book of Flash and the Green Lantern ("Faster Friends") that another of the survivors was seen reading.

And it's borne fruit. That polar bear? Well, by tracking down and reading a copy of the comic, fans learned that the appearance of the bear is one of several events on the island that also happen in the Flash-Green Lantern story. So, when a character named Sawyer got to reading "Watership Down" by Richard Adams and later Madeleine L'Engle's children's book "A Wrinkle in Time," aficionados grabbed the books and scoured them for meaning.

Adams' 1972 best seller is about rabbits fleeing a developer and seeking a safe haven, while L'Engle's work, published in 1962, deals with space and time travel. Wright and the other writers and producers on "Lost" are coy about such hints. O'Brien's book from Dalkey, Wright says, "was chosen very specifically for a reason." It's narrated by a dead man although the reader doesn't learn this until the end of the book. A red herring, perhaps? Or a telling hint? Wright won't say.

The tales of the schoolboy wizard and his fight against the evil Voldemort have been translated into 63 languages. Six Potter books have been written with one more in the series promised by Rowling, one of the world's most successful writers.

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More than a third of all the Potter novels sold have been sold in the United States. The latest Potter novel The Half-Blood Prince was published in July after a two-year wait and became a global best-seller. Shares in Rowling's UK publisher Bloomsbury surged to an all-time high when the publication date was revealed.

By tradition, the 18-member group that makes up the 219-year-old institution, announces on a Tuesday that it will name the winner the following Thursday at 7 a.m. EDT.

It's also led to speculation that academy members may be locked in fierce debate as to who should take home this year's prize, which includes a $1.3 million prize, a gold medal and a diploma, along with a guaranteed boost in sales.

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Ahead of the academy's likely announcement next week, several authors, including Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates have been touted by Nobel watchers, along with Margaret Atwood of Canada and Nuruddin Farah of Somalia. Other perennials include Peruvian-born Mario Vargas Llosa. Europeans have won the literature prize in nine of the past 10 years, so the experts think the academy may look elsewhere this year.

Last year, the prize went to Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. In 2003, it went to South African writer J.M. Coetzee. Other names bandied about as winners, or at least strong favorites for the 2005 prize, include Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said, known as Adonis; Korean poet Ko Un; and Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

"Turning a breakup into a break-over" is how Behrendt describes his newest self-help book. "We want women to know that as bad as it can be, it can also be an opportunity to reinvent yourself."

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Behrendt tells women to transform themselves into what he calls a "hot happening super fox." "It's your version of whatever that is. We use those words because they are kind of empowering. Try to get back into your life and get back on track with dreams you have. There's nothing more attractive than a person who likes herself."

Behrendt is, himself, obviously on a roll. He's scheduled to plug his new book on the Today show and Late Night with Conan O'Brien this week, and he and Tuccillo are collaborating on the movie script for He's Just Not That Into You. How do you make a movie out of a self-help book? "You'll just have to wait and see," he says.