"The author recalls how, after becoming very familiar with the Biblical Old Testament in its original Hebrew growing up, an encounter with an English language version led her on a ten-year project of examining various translations of the Old Testament andtheir histories,"--Novelist.

In The War of the Ring Christopher Tolkien takes up the story of the writing of The Lord of the Rings with the Battle of Helm's Deep and the drowning of Isengard by the Ents. This is followed by an account of how Frodo, Sam and Gollum were finally brought to the Pass of Kirith Ungol, at which point J.R.R. Tolkien wrote at the time: 'I have got the hero into such a fix that not even an author will be able to extricate him without labour and difficulty'....

An account of the dramatic writing of and fight to publish James Joyce's "Ulysses" reveals how the now classic book was the subject of a landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933 that overturned key censorship laws.