Ann Patchett has won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Bel Canto, which was a Top Ten Book Sense 76 selection last year. The prize awards the writer $15,000, making it the largest juried award for fiction in the U.S.

Make no mistake, notwithstanding its witty title, A Child’s Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper (Scribner) is definitely not a tale for little ones. This Book Sense 76 March/April selection is a story that mingles animal characters from children’s books with true crime elements -- a gruesome murder, an unexplained disappearance -- and perpetual human dramas -- the search for truth and the loss of innocence.

Dan Jaffe, co-owner of Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, California, and general manager of the entire group of eight Copperfield’s stores, died this month at the age of 50. The cause was apparently a heart attack, said colleague Tom Montan, who noted that Jaffe died at home sometime after March 16.

Thirty booksellers will win the opportunity to visit with top New York authors during BookExpo America by entering the first ABFFE Author Auction. The online auction kicked off Wednesday, March 26, at 9:00 a.m. EST on the Web site of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), www.abffe.com. The auction ends on Friday, March 29, at 3:00 p.m.

Ruminator Books, the venerable St. Paul bookstore, now with a Minneapolis location as well, was an original participant in the Book Sense program. It also signed on to BookSense.com when that became an option.

On March 20, at a ceremony held at the New York Public Library, author Colson Whitehead was honored with the Young Lions Fiction Award [YLFA] for his novel John Henry Days (Doubleday). Established in 2001, YLFA awards a $10,000 prize to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories. Remarkably, this year, all the nominees for YLFA were also Book Sense 76 picks. John Henry Days was a July/August Book Sense 76 pick.

"I do everything late in life," said 55-year-old Kurt Corriher, author of the debut thriller Someone to Kill (Forge). "I have my children late in life -- I have a son who’s nine, and a daughter who’s 13 -- and I publish a novel late in life."

George P. Pelecanos, the crime-fiction author whose Hell to Pay (Little, Brown) is a Book Sense 76 pick for March/April, started laying the groundwork for a writing career when he was still a youngster -- although he didn't know it then.

A three-year-old girl falls off a second-floor balcony, lands on her head and breaks her skull. Three days later, she's playing in the snow, fully recovered -- an astounding medical success. But what if this accident had occurred in a remote village in the Indian Himalayas with an American woman doctor performing the surgery for the first time while carefully consulting the medical textbook open in front of her? In this experience, you not only have a chapter from Craig Joseph Danner's self-published novel, Himalayan Dhaba, but also a page from his life.

Virginia Hamilton, an internationally renowned and award-winning author of children’s literature, died February 19, 2002, in Dayton, Ohio. She had been ill with cancer for a number of years. Hamilton was 65.