Taylor Lautner

I’ve overheard teen-agers in my backseat having more intelligent conversation than you hear in two hours of “New Moon.” And if they were as depressed as Bella and Edward, I would send them to the emergency room, not Florida (as…

David Plouffe, President Obama’s campaign manager, is in St. Louis Friday for “The Audacity to Win.” Wonder if Karl Rove, credited with George W. Bush’s “ascendency,”  will book St. Louis on a  tour next year? Here’s news of his book…

Washington University’s Carl Phillips didn’t win a National Book Award this year for his poetry collection “Speak Low.” But it must have been an interesting night in New York for the finalist, anyway, with special awards going to Gore Vidal…

David Plouffe, the campaign manager who gets a lot of the credit for putting Barack Obama in the White House, is on a victory lap book tour for “The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s…

If ya’ll hurry, you might be able to nail the St. Louis quiz at The Pioneer Woman website. It’s open till 6 p.m.

Ree Drummond drew about 600 people last night to her book signing at Christ Church Cathedral, said Danielle Borsch…

When Herta Müller won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, I jokingly asked her translator whether he felt just a little like he’d won too.

“No,” said Philip Boehm, who lives in University City. But hey, now he’s translating her Nobel acceptance…

Toriano Porter, the assistant sports editor at The Examiner in Independence, Mo., has written and self-published a book called “The Pride of Park Avenue.”

Apparently this Park Avenue isn’t the ritzy place in New York but the sometimes sketchy fairway that runs east and…

When former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin speaks at the College of the Ozarks next month, the media are not invited.

A spokeswoman for the school says keeping the media out was part of Palin’s contract for her Dec. 2 speech.

Palin…

Ree Drummond has found herself a sweet gig. A couple of them, in fact.

She’s styled herself as The Pioneer Woman in a blog that draws millions of hits (most, we figure, are from women) who appreciate her colorful pictures and posts…