David Gates

Q&A: CAMERON DIAZ On her new MTV show, called "Trippin," Cameron Diaz and cool celebrity friends go to cool places like Nepal and Chile. Diaz chatted with NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin.Why did you decide to do this show?It was my last-ditch effort to do something with my celebrity before I high-tail it out of town--no, I'm kidding.

Jonathan Safran Foer, already a literary rock star with his 2002 "Everything Is Iluminated," has now taken on his generation's supposedly defining moment: his young narrator's father died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

If She's So Rich... No, We Won't Say ItWhat's a man's worst fear when his granddaughter is the richest girl in the world? Probably that some older lothario (married, with a child, no less) will sweep her off her feet, whisk her off to the tropics and propose marriage once his divorce is final.

Saturday," the new novel by Ian McEwan, finally gets rolling when a London neurosurgeon thwarts a strange attacker--who happens to have a neurological condition.

As of last week, there was no word of a suicide note from Hunter Thompson, and it's just as well: that would be a document so scary it should be suppressed, like the Third Secret of Fatima.

M*A*S*H"'s beloved "Hawkeye" Pierce is up for best supporting actor at this year's Oscars. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin.In "The Aviator," you play a horrible guy.

Back in the late '60s, Arthur Miller was on vacation in the Caribbean and spotted a man, standing ankle deep in the surf, who proved to be Mel Brooks. Now, in all of American theater, Brooks, for whom irreverent is too solemn a word, is as close as you'll find to the earnest Miller's evil twin.

You were in Will Smith's "Miami" video years back. Did he remember you? I was crushed. I didn't have the part yet when I went to meet him. So I'm sitting there and it didn't come up.

It's gratifyingly romantic to see the history of Hollywood as a saga of visionary filmmakers against philistine studios. That's the subtext of both New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman's "Rebels on the Backlot," about '90s maverick directors including Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, and biographer Clinton Heylin's "Despite the System," a blow-by-blow account of the travails of the arch martyr Orson Welles. "This is a story that goes all the way back to the beginning of cinema in this...

Do you remember the sheepish look he used to get when he'd told a joke that didn't fly? The way he couldn't keep a straight face when he put on the stupid turban to do the stupid Carnac the Magnificent routine?

Q&A: Debra MessingDebra Messing, the klutzy Grace Adler of "Will & Grace," is about to hit the big screen in "The Wedding Date." She spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin.In "Wedding Date" you hire a guy to play your boyfriend.

Get Lifted John Legend Legend played piano on Lauryn Hill's "Everything Is Everything" while still in his teens and was writing songs for Alicia Keys and Janet Jackson just a few years later.

Q&A: Brigitte NielsenLast year the unlikely duo of Brigitte Nielsen and Flavor Flav somehow hit it off on "The Surreal Life." Now the producers have given them a reality show all their own.

This third collection of Williams's darkly comic stories still has the deadpan feel of the best '70s and '80s fiction. Like Raymond Carver, she keeps her eye on the dislocations in her characters' lives and her ear on the glitches in their speech. ("I don't have a reservation," says a girl at a hair salon. "You mean an appointment," she's told.) And no one is better at suggesting a disordered consciousness through a small eccentricity: "She loved vending machine coffee.

JERRY ORBACH, 69Best known as the sardonic cop Lenny Briscoe on "Law & Order," Orbach starred in the original off-off-Broadway production of "The Fantasticks," and in such Broadway hits as "42nd Street," "Chicago" and "Promises, Promises," for which he won a Tony Award.

Shakespeare hasn't had a bad year since he died in 1616--that was a rough one--and in 2004 he got more ink than Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe. Frank Kermode's masterly contextualizing in "The Age of Shakespeare" was outflashed by Stephen Greenblatt's ingeniously speculative "Will in the World" and outpopped by "The Essential Shakespeare Handbook," a useful illustrated tour guide through his career.

NONFICTIONChronicles Volume One by Bob Dylan: memoir from the involuntary "prophet" of a generation. The reclusive legend doesn't tell all--did you expect him to?--he tells stories of his early days in Greenwich Village and his subsequent trips to celebrity hell with a sharp eye for detail and ear for dialogue, and in a voice that's all his own.DeKooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan: The authors host a terrific tour of DeKooning's world, especially the boozing and...

When Abraham Lincoln delivered his second Inaugural Address--"With malice toward none; with charity for all"--the man who would assassinate him six weeks later "was even then standing just a few feet away." Or so Michael W.

After Harold Bloom's brilliant and madly readable bestseller "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" (1998), which took 700-odd pages to discuss each of the plays, who needs Marjorie Garber's "Shakespeare After All"--which takes 989 pages to do the same thing?

The "American Idol" star Clay Aiken and the lyric soprano Renee Fleming must have heard each other's names: in the 2003 World Series they each sang the national anthem, he in Game 1, she in Game 2.

For years, Tom Wolfe has argued that contemporary novelists fail to "engage with the life around them." What he really means is the life that has always engaged him as a journalist: a gaudily corrupted culture driven by lust and the urge to dominate, and where nobody is as smart as Tom Wolfe.

Since the best years of a life often make the slowest pages of a biography, readers who pick up Geoffrey C. Ward's "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson" might be tempted to skip right to part two for the reprehensible pleasure of wallowing in a meltdown.

Q&A: TATUM O'NEALRyan's daughter (she says she smoked dope with him), McEnroe's ex-wife, ex-junkie--Tatum O'Neal tells it all in her autobiography, "A Paper Life." She spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nicki Gostin.How has your family reacted to the book?So far the reaction from my side of the family has been pretty bad.

They never knew about the extermination of the Jews. They did know, but they took no part in it. They took part in it, but they had only followed orders: their superiors dreamed up the exterminations.

They never knew about the extermination of the Jews. They did know, but they took no part in it. They took part in it, but they had only followed orders: their superiors dreamed up the exterminations.

Russell Banks is hardly the friskiest novelist, but in "The Darling," a Graham Greeneish downer/thriller set during Liberia's gruesome civil wars, he does tip us one knowing wink.

Richard Avedon was still hard at work at the age of 81 when he suffered a brain hemorrhage at a shoot in Texas, where he was preparing a photo essay on democracy for The New Yorker; this quintessential Manhattanite died last week at a hospital in San Antonio.

BOB DYLAN IS ABOUT TO PUBLISH A REMARKABLY CANDID, LONG-AWAITED MEMOIR. HE GAVE US THE FIRST EXCERPT, AND WE SAT DOWN FOR AN EXTRAORDINARILY WIDE-RANGING TALK.

You don't really need a sense of history to appreciate what Johnny Ramone did for rock and roll; two minutes (the length of a typical Ramones song) and a cheap pair of headphones will remind you.

Literary novelists generally leave alternative history (take a big what if and go from there) to writers of pop fiction and sci-fi. This is either because of its fundamental unseriousness--at bottom, who cares about an if that never happened?--or because of the sheer drudgery involved in elaborating some counter-factual premise.