Brown has occupied a curious place in American letters ever since his thriller The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003.

LOS ANGELES -- One of his year's Oscar-nominated documentary short films is about a timely topic involving education. It's called "The ABCs of Book Banning." It's not so much about the adults who are ...

In 2003, if you made the mistake of confessing — say, at a barbecue — that you reviewed books for a living, the other men on the patio would look at you piteously until one of them thought to ask, ...