The 1692 Massacre of Glencoe can still rouse passions today, so it's a brave author who tries to wrest fiction from it. In her third novel, Susan Fletcher approaches the massacre using two main characters, one historical, the other semi-legendary. What emerges is very much a literary, rather than a traditional historical, novel.

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The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archives of writer David Foster Wallace, announced the center on March 9. Highlights of the collection, some of which can now be viewed online, include handwritten notes and drafts, research, and teaching materials owned by the Infinite Jest author, who died in 2008.

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Gail Hareven's The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from Hebrew into English by Dalya Bilu, was given the 2010 Best Translated Book Award on March 10. Organized by international liteturature resource Three Percent at the University of Rochester, the Best Translated Book Award honors the best original works of international literature and poetry published in English in the US over the past year.

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Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, as in the French writer Lydie Salvayre's other novels, treats us to a meditative work of fiction narrated by someone trying to find their foothold in the void. This time, Salvayre's void is high finance and the "free market". An unnamed female narrator has agreed to write the authorised biography of the richest man in the world, a fast-food magnate called Tobold the Hamburger King.

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On March 9, HarperCollins imprint 4th Estate and app developer Enhanced Editions released a new Wolf Hall application for iPhone and iPod Touch. The app includes an e-book version of Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winning title, as well as family trees, an essay by Mantel, a video discussion, and a news feed.

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American actress and singer Hilary Duff is set to publish a series of young adult novels, announced publisher Simon & Schuster on March 9. The first novel in the series, Elixir, will be published in hardcover in October 2010.

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Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island holds the top spot for the fourth consecutive week on Amazon.com's list of bestselling Kindle e-books, released March 9 by Publishers Marketplace. Holding on to second and third place for the week ending March 6 are longtime bestsellers The Help by Kathryn Stockett and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

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The Jacobean tastes of Alfred Hitchcock, that working-class Englishman, have wormed their way into the cultural mainstream. Especially with Psycho, a film with a wavering sense of near-farce saved by the most brilliant musical score in movie history, by Bernard Herrmann. Go to see Martin Scorsese's new film, Shutter Island; you'll find Leonardo DiCaprio taking a shower. The shower head, a fully referenced Psycho flower of radiating water, is like an advancing medical instrument in an alien laboratory.

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They arrived from every corner of the country. They were from men women and children, of every race, age, class and calling. Half a century on, they have come to life again, expressing Americans' grief, shock and collective sense of bereavement at the news of John F Kennedy's assassination.

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It's 11.45am and the Central Hall in Westminster is heaving with yakking schoolkids. Fifteen-year-olds, with iPods, notebooks and temporarily customised uniforms, file up the stairs chattering like jackdaws, as though at a hip-hop gig.

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It's almost 62 years since the "nakba" or cataclysm that saw the invasion of Palestine or, to put it another way, the founding of the state of Israel.

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The protagonist Courtney Stone wakes up in a dream, and "doomed to be an anachronism" since it is now 1813 England, rather than the present-day Los Angeles from which she hails. She revels in the reflection of the unfamiliar woman gazing back at her ? a woman called Jane Mansfield. She also has to inhabit an entirely different body of thought and feeling, and over the course of the novel will struggle to fit into some rigid notions. Jane has just awoken from a riding accident and is confronting a world deciding how to treat her: is she best off in an asylum? Or having "the offensive humours in the blood" drained out of her? Or simply eating and sleeping well?

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Twenty-seven-year-old Ludo, who was born Ludwig Aparecido dos Santos, works for a communications company high above the city of Sao Paulo. Real communication, though, is more mysterious and complex than any corporation can master, especially communication across the gulf between rich and poor that exists in such a place.

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February 1964, and a portly female lecturer in early middle age sits hunched beneath a Goya print in her top-floor office at the Royal College of Art (RCA), marking scripts. In the corridor, a man 20 years her junior hovers, waiting to be invited in to discuss his thesis. Within moments, David Morgan would be standing before Iris Murdoch. Little did either know this meeting would signal the start of a relationship of increasingly emotional encounters and a correspondence whose tone would veer from passion to acrimony over a period of three decades.

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The first task facing anyone who sits down to write "A Countercultural History of London Since 1945" is to work out what he means by countercultural. Is it just another word for bohemian, or a blanket term to describe any self-consciously left-field artistic activity? In his introduction, Barry Miles mentions London's "creative life... more particularly its bohemian, beatnik, hippy and countercultural life", but that, too, begs more questions than it answers. The ever-reliable adjective "transgressive" pops up every so often, yet this is a book which places Kingsley Amis alongside Genesis P Orridge, and prompts the thought that any net capable of tangling up Lucky Jim and COUM Transmissions in a single mesh is so vast as to be scarcely worth the flinging.

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For an indication of the health of British poetry, says Lemn Sissay, look no further than the strength of the entries to young people's competitions. "They're the momentum in a movement," he says ? the force against a "competitive note" that has entered the contemporary poetry scene. The 42-year-old performance poet has just completed a week teaching the 15 winners of last year's Foyle Young Poets Award, which drew a record 14,000 entries from all over the world ? and, by his reckoning, the future of the art form is very bright indeed.

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On the morning of 18 February 1516, at the royal palace in Greenwich on the banks of the River Thames, the daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon was born. On 14 December 1558, she was buried in Westminster Abbey. This rigorously researched book brings back to life the period in between; a period in history in which unprecedented events took place.

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Jonathan Lyons dedicates his book ? an account of "How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization" ? to his father, who introduced him "to the power of ideas". In its pages, key ideas which shape our world are passionately explored ? how they originated and their influence and legacy.

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Although this is Frances de Pontes Peebles' first novel, her prose flows with the assuredness of a natural storyteller's. Each sentence of her epic narrative is stitched with meaning and insight, and the reader's imagination is woven into the novel from the very first paragraph

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