Novel

In one way or another, Manil Suri has spent his entire life charting what happens when polar opposites are brought together in unexpected and at times startling juxtapositions. Suri, 53, is an acclaimed novelist, and a career mathematician who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He spent the first two decades of his life in India and the past three in the United States. Though all his books to date have been set in Mumbai, they are written in English. Suri's debut novel, "The Death of Vishnu," set off a bidding war between 11 publishing houses in 2001.

In his new thriller, "The Third Bullet," novelist Stephen Hunter sets his sights on an American tragedy that's also the most famous gun mystery of all time - the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The questions surrounding the shooting as JFK rode in a motorcade in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, have never been fully put to rest. And the controversy is certain to intensify as the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaches this fall. As the novelist tells it, the decision to enlist his fictitious super-sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, to determine whether the gunman acted alone or as part of a conspiracy began as a joke.

The Oscar nominees for best picture owe a huge debt to books -- and the creativity of authors. Most of the top films are screen versions of tales that were woven by printed words (or digitized versions). That's not taking anything away from the writers who adapt a novel or work of non-fiction. I'm slogging my way through Victor Hugo's Les Miserables now, and it is a wonder that a hit musical and movie could be distilled from the sprawling 1800s. Here are other adaptations that join Les Mis in the best picture category: -- "Lincoln," drawn from " Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Attorneys challenging a death sentence before the state's highest court last week dug deeply into online historical documents to divine the intention behind what they think is a never-before-interpreted part of the state's constitution. Public defender Brian Saccenti and a team of lawyers rested their argument in part on a once-famous 18th-century book by a young Italian nobleman named Cesare Beccaria, who suggested that capital punishment should be reserved for treasonous criminals.

The Maryland Court of Appeals heard a new argument against the death penalty Thursday, when attorneys for a man convicted of a 1997 murder argued that the state's constitution only allows capital punishment in cases of treason. Public defender Brian Saccenti argued that a clause in the Maryland Declaration of Rights referring to "sanguinary laws" limits the death penalty to crimes that threaten the stability of the state government. "We have ways to fairly incapacitate people that we lacked in 1776," Saccenti told the judges, arguing that the state can be protected without executions.

Harrison Demchick is by his own account an optimist. He doesn't think that human society or our ruling institutions have become irredeemably corrupt. He didn't make one single preparation for this past Friday, when the Mayan calendar came to an abrupt — and some would say ominous — halt. So the 28-year-old Owings Mills resident is an unlikely candidate to have made his literary debut last week with an apocalyptic horror novel called "The Listeners. " In the book, an unnamed city is being ravaged by an airborne, flesh-eating plague that turns those it infects into walking corpses.

In her historical novels, Annapolis author Erika Robuck invents everyday men and women whose lives intersect with those of acclaimed American authors. She figures that fiction is sometimes the best way of learning something true. "I'm interested in famous writers and how they used the people in their lives," Robuck says. "They take things, and they don't always ask permission. It's such a betrayal. " Robuck's current novel, "Hemingway's Girl," tells the story of Mariella Bennet, a young, half-Cuban housemaid who must negotiate the marital minefield created by Ernest Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.

When author Margaret Meacham was a little girl, she let her imagination soar while perched high in the branches of a buckeye tree in her family's Pittsburgh backyard. Now, half a century after those leafy daydreams, the 60-year-old Meacham is a popular author of children's books, some of which have been translated into German and French. She has taught creative writing to hundreds of students at Goucher College and online through the Gotham Writers' Workshop. She is the mother of three grown children and lives in Brooklandville with her husband and their two dogs.

After a successful inaugural three-play season at its Eastport Shopping Center location, Compass Rose Studio Theater opens its second season with Christopher Sergel's stage adaptation of Harper Lee's acclaimed novel "To Kill a Mockingbird. " The play's strong script and powerful message make it an ideal vehicle for the Annapolis acting academy-theater. "Since opening its doors to students in 2010, Compass Rose has reached over 400 from age 3 to senior citizens in 10 Anne Arundel venues," founding artistic director Lucinda Merry-Browne said.