March 30, 2010 When Madison Smartt Bell was researching his trilogy of novels about the struggle for Haitian independence, it took him ten years to find the materials he needed—and not because Google didn’t yet exist. “At the time that I got my first glimpse of it, the Haitian Library of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit had recently been unearthed from the hiding place it had occupied during the Duvalier regime,” he writes in an article in The Huffington Post. “The Spiritain fathers were prominent in the liberation theology movement, whose democratic activism made them enemies of the dictatorial state. Duvalier expelled them from Haiti in the sixties; the library was boxed, and effectively buried.”

March 27, 2010 Nashville novelist Ann Patchett has written probably a million words in her own career, but brevity is the soul of her new endeavor: Patchett will judge the fourth round of National Public Radio’s “Three Minute Fiction” contest. As in the past, contestants must write a story that can be read aloud in less than three minutes without forcing Guy Raz to transform himself into an auctioneer. (That’s about 600 words, tops.) But this year Patchett has introduced a new wrinkle: all stories must contain the words, “plant,” “button,” “trick,” and “fly.”

March 25, 2010 Not every novel featuring a young protagonist is appropriate for young readers, but Silas House didn’t want to exclude anyone when he wrote Eli the Good. As House tells Darnell Arnoult, “I just wanted to write a book that anyone could read, so I made sure that it was suitable for high school and on up.” But an open-armed welcome to teen readers doesn’t mean the book is boring for adults, he adds.