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Hisham Matar fled Libya in the 1970s as a 9-year-old boy. This week, he releases his debut novel, In the Country of Men, a story told through the eyes of a Libyan boy. Like Matar, the boy's father is a political dissident hunted down by the Libyan government.

Scientists have found that female butterflies adapt to male-killing bacteria by becoming more promiscuous, while surviving males become exhausted and put less effort into mating.

In The Invention of Hugo Cabret, author and illustrator Brian Selznick uses a striking combination of text and drawings to tell the story of Hugo, an orphan in Paris, and a reclusive genius from the early days of silent film.

Candidates could spend a total of $1 billion to run for president in 2008. Former Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe says that presidential candidates can't be taken seriously unless they have serious money.

An almost mythic American author from the upper Midwest, Jim Harrison writes about big themes that could be called Hemingwayesque: land, death and life. Harrison has won a cult following for his lyrical fiction, in addition to writing poetry, essays and a memoir. His new novel is Returning to Earth.

A baboon with "an unsettling mastery of human speech" is the chief protagonist in Mr. Thundermug, the first book by author Cornelius Medvei. The idea for a story about a talking baboon sprang from a dream that one of Medvei's friends described to him.

In April 1975, Bich Minh Nguyen and her family fled Saigon and settled in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, captures what it was like to be Vietnamese in the conservative, largely white town — and the role that food played in her assimilation.

When Elif Shafak's novel The Bastard of Istanbul was published in her home country, the best-selling author was accused of "public denigration of Turkishness." She was eventually acquitted.

In his new book, Dr. Michael Stein uses the stories of patients, including that of his terminally ill brother-in-law, to explore the personal side of sickness. Stein, a professor of medicine and community health at Brown University Medical School, discusses The Lonely Patient: How We Experience Illness.

"Disappearances" — long-term detention without trial or access to anyone — used to be rare in Pakistan. But human rights activists say scores have been taken in the last couple of years.