One hundred years ago, a play titled “R.U.R.,” by Karel Čapek, debuted in Prague and gave us the word “robot.” Since then, androids have been dreaming of electric sheep, and we’ve been having nightmares about the robot apocalypse.

It was the fall of 2017, and Keanu Reeves had been carrying around a character in his head. The actor so associated with portraying a phalanx of dark-clad fighters kept envisioning a world-weary warrior whose birth predated even human language.

Following the loss of a dear friend, Ike Andrews felt moved to take a break from his old love, fiction. His latest work, “Lessons From the Trail,” relates a series of anecdotes taken from decades spent exploring.

Former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith will give a virtual presentation for Spokane Community College's “Diversity Dialogue” speaker series. The presentation is free and open to the public and will be streamed.

Six Dr. Seuss books – including “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo” – will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery, the business that preserves the author's legacy said Tuesday.

In 2015, a professor at the University of Southern California published his first novel titled “The Sympathizer.” The story was a cerebral work of historical fiction and political satire cleverly infiltrated with cultural criticism.

Most people have joked or fanaticized about being able to clone themselves. Oh, how much they could get done by being able to be two places at once. Sarah Gailey brings that fantasy to life with one bizarre twist.

It took some time for author Sarah Gailey to earnestly put pen to paper, but Gailey's earliest memories were overflowing with story ideas. “I tossed around wanting to be a writer when I was a teenager," Gailey said.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the acclaimed essayist and novelist who expanded the world of Wakanda for Marvel comics, will write the script for a new “Superman” film from Warner Bros. The studio announced Friday that Coates will pen the screenplay.

Two hundred and nine years ago, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – both highly educated experts in German literature – published a collection of old German folk tales they called “Kinder-und Hausmärchen”: “Children’s and Household Tales.” We know these today as “Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, bookseller and activist who helped launch the Beat movement in the 1950s and embodied its curious and rebellious spirit well into the 21st century, has died at age 101.

One of the world's better known fans of mystery novels, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is now writing one. Clinton is teaming up with her friend, novelist Louise Penny, on “State of Terror,” which has a plot that might occur to someone of Clinton's background.

Cindy McCain, widow of Sen. John McCain, will have a memoir out this spring. Forum, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced Tuesday that “Stronger: Courage, Hope and Humor in My Life With John McCain” will be released April 27.

When Dori Hillestad Butler’s adult daughter visited for the first time after adopting a cat, it was obvious her childhood dog – who still lives with Butler – noticed there was a newcomer in the family.

Are audiobooks books? Certainly listening to a book is a different experience from reading. Backtracking to check details in an audiobook is awkward, and you don’t retain as much as you do with the printed version.

A book designer by trade, local writer and outdoors enthusiast Joshua Powell spent years bringing the work of other authors to life. After hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2012, he realized he’d finally found a topic worth covering himself.

If you know Stan Lee’s name, it’s likely as Smilin’ Stan, Stan the Man, Marvel’s groovy self-promoting patriarch/editor whose silly appearances in the MCU movies were an in-joke, a living reminder of where the stories started.

Writing duo Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman discussed their debut novel “Girls With Bright Futures” during a virtual gathering of the Northwest Passages Book Club moderated by the Spokesman-Review’s Kristi Burns Thursday.

There’s nothing minimalist about the 25th anniversary “A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary.” Praised by the Guardian as one of the seminal books about music, the out-of-print work was recently republished by Faber and Faber.