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Italo Calvino's brilliant, ludic stories show a writer far ahead of his time, says Ursula K Le GuinThe summer reading I like best is either a lovely, long, fat novel to lie down with and get lost in, or a collection of stories, like a basket of summer fruit, to savour one or two at a time. Here, from Italo Calvino, is a great big basket of stories - nectarines, apricots, peaches, figs, everything.It's a compendium of the volume Cosmicomics (published in English in 1968), seven newly translated stories from La Memoria del Mondo (1968), all the stories from Time and the Hunter (1969), four from Numbers in the Dark (1995), and a couple of uncollected pieces. It's a joy to have all the Cosmicomics within one cover - and a handsome cover it is, and a well-made book. More than a third of the stories were entirely new to me, and will be to most readers in English; some of them are jewels. The translations are entirely satisfactory, and Martin McLaughlin's introduction couldn't be better as a

The film-maker is renowned as an artist who stayed in Iran after the Islamic revolution of 1979, when others fled abroad. As his new film premieres in Edinburgh, he talks to Maya JaggiAbbas Kiarostami was about to celebrate his 50th birthday when the earthquake of 1990 hit northern Iran. He drove with his son from the capital, Tehran, to the devastated region, where he had recently filmed Where Is the Friend's House?, an acutely observed moral tale about a boy striving to return an exercise book to a classmate to save him from punishment. The feature won him acclaim at the Locarno film festival in 1989. 'Travelling in the area touched me deeply,' he says. 'I had such a close and profound experience of death that it changed my work in an optimistic way.'After completing And Life Goes On and Through the Olive Trees, two more films set around the earthquake-devastated village of Koker which, together, are often seen as his masterpiece, in 1997 he made Taste of Cherry, in which a man deter

As a new novel explores Hollywood's frenetic growth in the 1910s, we look back at the sights and stars of its formative years

Big Brother 10 housemate Cairon Austin-Hill has been warned about his behaviour after an argument with Sree Disari. As Sree, Ciaron, Karly Ashworth, Siavash Sabbaghpour and Sophie Reade discussed bad language in the house on the eighth day of the new series, student union president Sree criticised the way in which Cairon and Siavash speak in front of female housemates.

Times OnlineHow Katrina Kaif made it from Barnet to BollywoodTimes Online, UKFlick through this month's Indian edition of Vogue or any one of the country's gossipy tabloids and you will see one face pictured again and again ? that of Bollywood's newest megastar: a 24-year-old from the London borough of Barnet. ...Katrina Kaif's success journey from Barnet to Bollywood Thaindian.comall 13 news articles

It's been a slow news week from my eyes. Sure, there was the horrible shooting of the security guard at Washington's Holocaust Museum, new unfoldings in the Air France disaster...Source: John MyersPublished: Jun 12, 2009

We talk with stars Jada Pinkett Smith and Michael Vartan about their new TNT medical drama.

Take a look at this new crop of images from the upcoming wizard adventure.

Road to the Emmys: Made-For's & Mini-Series: WGBH/BBC -- The BBC has been adapting the novels of Charles Dickens for as long as it's been doing drama. What's new is the depth and breadth -- OK, the length -- of the latest TV versions, the most recent being 'Little Dorrit.'

Vampire fighter Anita Blake is back in the hunt; a multimedia mystery series for kids is out with another adventure; and readers ...