Arts & Life

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• Anne of Green Gables, who is described in Lucy Maud Montgomery's best-selling books as red-headed, freckled and — at least when the Anne series begins — prepubescent, gets a horribly wrong makeover on the cover of this three-book set published in November.

Sometime in the mid-1960s — no one's really sure when — Lena Hughes walked into a recording studio, probably in Arkansas. What we do know is that she recorded 11 tunes on the guitar.

"It's kind of like listening to 1880," folklorist Howard Marshall says. "You kind of get a wonderful, ancient vibration."

Marshall wrote a book about traditional music in Missouri, called Play Me Something Quick and Devilish.

The board game Monopoly will no longer include the iron token. After a month of voting, fans have chosen a cat as its replacement. Players will start seeing the new feline visitor on their Monopoly boards by fall of this year.

  This past July, when A.J. Hartley made his annual journey to New York City’s Thrillerfest, the UNC Charlotte theatre professor found himself swapping stories with a fellow Brit, New York Times best-selling author Lee Child of Jack Reacher fame. While sharing drinks at the cocktail hour, the two compared notes about growing up in England. While Childs drew on his experience of being the biggest, baddest dude in his neighborhood to create his larger than life Reacher character, Hartley took a softer, more cerebral route.

Transcript

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, two kids, split level in the Virginia suburbs. They're on a travel agency and drive a big boxy Oldsmobile - a typical American family in Ronald Reagan's America, except for their other job as Soviet spies.

Last Wednesday night, when "The Americans" debuted on FX, an FBI agent moved in next door, which prompted Phillip, played Matthew Rhys, to suggests to Kerri Russell's Elizabeth it might be a good time to defect.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE AMERICANS")