Jack London

Emile Hirsch, the young star of Imaginary Heroes, knows what appeals to people in the character of Chris McCandless, the real-life hero of his new film, Into the Wild, which opens Friday. "Everybody shares that wanderlust," he says. It's what sent...

Here's more of our interview with Williamsburg author Larissa Ione: Why and how did you begin writing? I've been writing since I could hold a pencil. As a child, I penned long, involved stories, usually about animals. I completed my first full-length...

It is a winter pastime that, like cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, requires good snow, demands long underwear -- or, for some, thick fur -- and favors participants with a strenuous but exhilarating workout. But unlike those activities, dog...

Since Jack London's mysterious death in 1916, he has been, like one of the frozen men in his Klondike tales, a writer encased in his own reputation: We know him as the dog writer. Whether it was Buck in "The Call of the Wild," coming to terms with his...

Words & Ideas TODAY Sharmage Leland-St. John The poet will present and sign her new collection, "Contingencies." Book Soup, 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 7 p.m. Free. (310) 659-3110. Joseph Mattson, Elisa Ambrogio and Arthur Nersesian...

Where better for a writer to turn for inspiration than to reality? This is especially true of the mystery fiction micro-trend in which authors fashion real-life figures into detectives. It's tricky territory because the margin of error is so tiny. For...

He wears many hats -- rapper, singer, producer for artists such as Mos Def and Macy Gray -- but 88-Keys, whose teasingly genre-bending debut "The Death of Adam" was released this month, insists that all his hats bear one label: Polo by Ralph Lauren....

There was no snow at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, but the four sled dogs tethered there seemed acclimated enough. One amiably licked the face of a child in a stroller. The hubbub wasn't much like the Yukon, but the dogs were there to excite...

Mary Austin and the American West Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson University of California Press: 324 pp., $29.95 Few writers of her period overcame more obstacles than Mary Austin. Stuck in a disappointing marriage, Austin (1868-1934) spent the...

The george freeth memorial in Redondo Beach is a salt-bitten bust of a lifeguard in an old-fashioned swimming vest, gazing with the stoicism we expect from early surf heroes into the deep mystery of a concrete parking garage. His back is to the Redondo...

Harold "Hal" A. Ellis Jr., a founder of real estate services firm Grubb & Ellis Co. and one of the best known figures in U.S. real estate, died Monday of metastatic melanoma at his home in Piedmont, Calif. He was 77. Ellis built a small Oakland brokerage...

From Anton Chekhov's "Kashtanka" and Franz Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog," down through Jack London's "Call of the Wild" and "White Fang," and including Albert Payson Terhune's improbably massive canine oeuvre, right up to such iconic names as Lassie,...