Jane Smiley

Ten Days in the Hills Jane Smiley Alfred A. Knopf / 452 pages / $26 Here's a story for you: "A group of ten young people over the course of ten days" comes together "in a luxurious retreat from the horrors" of their chaotic society. They discuss "everyday concerns, and uneasiness about, on the one hand, money, and on the other hand, God." This narrative offers "celebrity-named characters in several stories. ... It observes contemporary manners and ideas," and the tales the characters tell "of mutability, of jokes and tricks and miracles, prepare them for their fates as well as distract them."

"Mao II," the 10th novel by Don DeLillo, has been given the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced in a statement released today. It won out over four other nominees, including "Frog," by Stephen Dixon, a professor of fiction in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.The award, which carries a prize of $10,000, will be presented at a dinner in Washington May 16. The PEN/Faulkner is the third major fiction award of the current literary season: Previously, Norman Rush's "Mating" won the National Book Award ("Frog" was also a nominee for that prize)

They're still doing it. In February of 1994, "A Thousand Acres," by Jane Smiley and winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was abruptly taken off the advanced-placement English class' reading list at Lynden High School in Washington State. A year later it is still off. According to Principal Ken Axelson, the school's Board of Directors and the Curriculum Advisory Committee reviewed the book in response to parental complaints about its being "stimulating and titillating." Neither board found the book titillating enough to officially ban. What they did instead was to pressure the principal and the English teacher teaching it to simply take the book off the reading list.

An interview with Ann Hart of Town Center Book Club. What book are members reading this month? "The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton" by Jane Smiley. Which books have members liked? "The Love of a Good Woman," a collection of short stories by Alice Munro; "Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner. How often does the club meet? Once a month at Oakland Manor in Columbia, usually the third Friday of the month. How many belong to the club? About eight. When was the club formed?

TITLE YOUR book "Mothers Who Think," and you are likely to start the same kind of fight that starts every time somebody refers to "mothers who work.""All mothers work," is the rebuff you face when you make that gaffe. And then you scurry to correct yourself by saying, "I mean, mothers who work outside the home."Camille Peri and Kate Moses could have bent to that kind of PC pressure in selecting the title to their book, and called it "Mothers Who Think Outside the Box." They would not only have been more correct -- because all mothers think -- but also more right.

ATHOUSAND Acres," Jane Smiley's novel about a troubled Iowa farm family, as won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, it was announced yesterday.Susan Faludi's "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Woman," a much-discussed work that has been a best-seller as well, won in the general non-fiction category.Philip Roth's "Patrimony: A True Story," a moving elegy to his father, took the prize in biography/autobiography. That category was especially competitive: Nominees included "The Journals of John Cheever," Art Spiegelman's "Maus II" and "The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan," a biography of an Indian mathematical prodigy that was written by Baltimore author Robert Kanigel.

It is not often that literature fuses with the swagger of hip-hop and the hilarity of stand-up comedy. The Baltimore Literary Death Match, which comes to the Baltimore Museum of Art on Saturday, celebrates these qualities in fiction, poetry and everything in between, transforming literature into edgy performance art. Co-created in 2006 by Todd Zuniga, founding editor of fiction-poetry-comics magazine Opium, Literary Death Match features...

James E. Ostendarp, a Baltimore native and former Amherst College football coach and running back for the New York Giants, died Thursday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at the Soldier's Home in Holyoke, Mass. He was 82. A graduate of Polytechnic Institute, Mr. Ostendarp earned a degree in education from Bucknell University and a master's degree in counseling from Columbia University. At Amherst, he led the football team for 33 seasons, retiring in 1992 with a record of 168-91-5.

This rich, attractively presented collection of 27 short stories -- written mainly by Americans during the past 30 years or so -- might have been entitled instead "A Literary New Year's Eve." Many of the characters are engaged in that end-of-the-year soul inventory that may occur at family festivities or the office Christmas party when one gazes around at all the dear, familiar faces and thinks: How on earth did I wind up here?Or, as the postmodern Scrooge in Thomas Disch's "Xmas" reflects: "Christmas was coming at him like the searchlight in pursuit of an escaped convict, ready to expose the mess he'd made of his life."