It's a pop-up world of panama hats and outdoor reading (when it's sunny), scarves and cups of coffee (when it's not), and an erudite audience.

Save dishes, save time, save money and eat well. Clarissa Dickson Wright shows us how in her new cookbook.

Authors discover the brazen pioneers and their wheelings and dealings to create the affluent area.

It could be a scene from a cheesy Hollywood movie. An aspiring writer receives a cardboard box containing $6000, and a note: "No Strings Attached".

Sarah Quigley is a novelist, poet and critic whose latest book, The Conductor (Vintage, $39.99) is on the NZ fiction bestseller list.

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series gained massive success in the shadow of Harry Potter. Expansion into the tricky adult fiction market is the next mission, writes Susie Mesure.

As with many of his generation, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt had been taken by the idea of "Shangri-La". Writer Mitchell Zuckoff shares this fascination in his new tale about a collision of cultures during the early war era.

Hedda Hopper was a remarkable woman. Not necessarily likeable, but her influence and reach as Hollywood's premier gossip columnist through the middle of last century is without dispute, as this enlightening book makes clear.

Glee star Chris Colfer has signed a book deal.

With a new cookbook out, one half of Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright, is happy.

Despite the glowing book-jacket recommendations from writers much loftier than me, I started out disliking Elizabeth Day's début novel, Scissors Paper Stone.

Geraldine Brooks ‘talks’ to the ghosts of the past. Bron Sibree reports.

One of the most interesting things about reading a historical novel is working out what period detailing preoccupies the novelist and is used as a means of anchoring it to its era.

It's hard to think of a recent debut novel as original and ambitious in its premise - or as successful in its execution - as S.J. Watson's Before I Go to Sleep.

David Hartnell has recently released his autobiography, Memoirs Of A Gossip Columnist (Penguin, $45).

Never mind its unappealing cover, this debut kids' novel is bound to enchant adults, too.

Auckland arts patron James Wallace is worried about financial support for the arts by upcoming generations of wealthy professionals.