book currents

Lately, the writer Louise Erdrich—whose newest story collection, “Python’s Kiss,” is out this week—has been reading books about children who have lost their parents. As she explained recently, these books examine questions of rootedness and inheritance in roundabout ways. In illustrating the results of cutting children off from their parents, they are also reminders of…

The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has written more than forty books, which have altogether sold more than a hundred and twenty million copies. (This week, a long-awaited adaptation of her “Scarpetta” series, which centers on a forensic pathologist, premières on Amazon, with Nicole Kidman in the title role.) How does she do it? “I learned…