Create your own free news widgets.

Actor Corbin Bernsen will shoot movie backed by and featuring citizens of Kipling, Sask.

Brian Friel's elegiac play is being given a first-rate revival by the Irish Repertory Theater.

BOSTON (Reuters) - John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.

John Updike, the prolific writer who was an enduring presence in post-war literature and a chronicler of the loves and losses of small-town America, has died of lung cancer aged 76.His publishing house, Alfred Knopf, announced the death in a hospice in Massachusetts, saying Updike was 'one of our greatest writers and he will be sorely missed.'In a writing career that began in the early 1950s at the New Yorker magazine, and kept on going like a literary powerhouse until the very end, Updike conjured up more than 50 books and explored virtually every form open to him. On top of a steady stream of essays, literary criticism and short stories, in addition to the more than 20 novels, beyond the poetry, there was a play Buchanan Dying and a memoir Self- Consciousness.Since his first book, a poetry collection, was published in 1958, there has only been five years without a new Updike book on the shelves.Despite the quantity, Updike maintained a quality in his work daunting even to much less p

A former Bahamas senator has been granted bail on charges she conspired to help extort $25 million from actor John Travolta after his son died from a seizure at a family vacation home.

The boyhood home of Pulitzer-winning author Cormac McCarthy, long abandoned and overgrown, has been destroyed by a fire even as preservationists tried in recent months to save it.

More than 100 feral cats and dogs were euthanized after authorities found them living among the remains of hundreds of other dead animals that had been dumped in trash bags at a man's rented property. Temecula police on Friday arrested a 67-year-old man on...

The University of Alberta is now home to the Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation, a new national drama institute that is the first of its kind in Canada.One of the centre's goals is to develop work that creates a more accurate reflection of the nation's cultural diversity by bringing together independent artists, theatre companies and researchers to examine and experiment with new approaches to theatre-making. In addition to the commissioning and developing of scripts, the Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation's mandate extends to engaging artists who do not necessarily work within the traditional playwriting model. In doing so, the centre will provide artists with the resources needed to work in non-conventional ways.'Until now, there hasn't really been a place in Canada where such a range of artists can be served,' said Kim McCaw, centre director and U of A drama professor. 'We are also committed to presenting new work, either on our own or in partnership with other companies and

John Updike has died after a battle with lung cancer. He was 76. Updike was born in Shillington, Pa., which became the model for his fictional town of Ollinger. In 1955, he joined the staff of the New Yorker and saw his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, published four years later.

BOSTON (Reuters) - American author John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the emotional drama of American small-town life with searing wit and vivid prose, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.