It’s called Pieces of Happily Ever After, and it’s written by Irene Zutell, who once covered the police beat and the usual community stuff in Scarsdale, Eastchester and Tuckahoe.

A Bronx native, Irene grew up in Eastchester.

(On the back cover, it gives a little bio on Irene: “She has written for People, Us Weekly, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, Newsday and others.” That’s us, The Journal News there in that “others.” Way cool, huh?)

To be fair, more->I can’t write a review of the novel because I was friends with Irene when she was here, in the late 1980s to 1991. Everyone still here who knew Irene remembers her fondly. But if I can’t give an objective review, I can still make some observations:

One thing about novels written by reporters — they’re often quick reads, and Irene’s 296-pager is no exception. I traded a few e-mails after we received it, and as we reminisced, Irene recalled that it was our columnist Phil Reisman, then a local editor, who had taught her the importance of grabbing readers from the start.

You can see that in her story. It starts off with a woman holed up in her own home with the paparazzi on her lawn because her husband has left her for a movie star. She hasn’t gone out for days and her young daughter, Gabby, is beginning to rebel.

Gabby is a lively kid, and the most vivid character in the book. Irene told me a bunch of publishers turned down the book because they didn’t feel that she could write dialogue that sounded like a 5-year-old. Which is funny, because Irene cribbed the kid’s lines from her own daughter’s speech. She even kept notes.

(She makes reference to this in the acknowledgments. As a fairly new fiction writer — this is her second novel — Irene uses the acknowledgments section to thank a group of people larger than the populations of some South Pacific islands. But she ends the section with “a special mention — or perhaps apology — to Olivia, whose expressions and insights I stole.”)

Irene tells me the novel’s plot comes from a real-life experience. She lived near the Moders when Danny Moder left his wife for Julia Roberts, a movie star of some note. Irene, then working for People, tried to get an exclusive from Moder’s ex for a magazine article. Unable to do that, she turned the scenario into a novel.

Well, that may have been the genesis of the idea. But the heart of the book is in the narrator, Alice, trying to deal with her daughter’s reactions to her father leaving and her mother’s new troubles.

Here’s one scene between Alice and Gabby:

I looked hard at her. “I mean, are you okay with Daddy not being here all the time?”

“Sure.” She eyed me suspiciously.

“Really?”

“Sure, why not? It’s nice and quiet here.”

“Oh, Daddy was too noisy?”

“No, you were. You were always yelling at Daddy.”

“I was not.”

“Yes you were. And then he’d yell back. Then you’d yell. Then he’d yell. It was loud. It really damaged my cochlea.”

Cochlea. I had read Gabby a book on her body. I explained to her that when she screamed, she could damage her cochlea, or inner ear. Now she was using it against me.

“I don’t think I yelled that much at Daddy.”

“Okay, Mommy, I could be wrong,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Actually, Olivia was younger than Gabby when she began uttering the lines that would help her mother write a book.

“Olivia was seriously still three — nearly four — when I read her Cinderella and after I finished, she was angry,” Irene wrote to me when we exchanged e-mails about the novel. “She told me that story didn’t work because if everything was supposed to go back to normal at midnight, the shoe should  too. I knew I was in trouble then. And I also knew I’d have to write about it. This book gave me the opportunity to use all the stuff Olivia said.”

So now you have a taste of the book and a glimpse at where it came from. If you want to learn more about it, visit Irene’s Web site here.

Dorothy B. Hughes was her name, and the book is The Blackbirder, about a woman with a mysterious past who has escaped World War II Europe. I was taken in by the opening:

The waiter was looking at her. Not just looking. He was watching. Under black caterpillar eyebrows, his cold little black eyes were crawling on her face.

She whispered, “That waiter is looking at me.” For a moment she thought she had said it out loud, that Maxl had heard her. Her lips had moved but she hadn’t spoken, only to herself. She mustn’t let Maxl guess that she had noticed the waiter. Maxl might have ordered the man to watch.

Don’t you just love that stuff?

And, if I felt bad not knowing about these novels by female writers, the foreword from the publisher tells me I’m not alone.

“Women write pulp? It seems like a contradiction in terms, given the tough-guy image of pulp fiction today.”

Modern fans of the genre, the foreword said, “would be hard pressed to name a woman pulp author, or even a character who isn’t a menacing femme fatale.”

“But women did write pulp, in large numbers and in all the classic pulp fiction genres, from hard-boiled noirs to breathless romances to edgy science fiction and taboo lesbian pulps.”

The Blackbirder begins in Manhattan and, after a murder within the first few pages, the main character, Julie Guille (or is it Juliet Marlbone? Or Marguerite Duchesme?) is off to New Mexico to find a man named Fran. A blackbirder is someone who can get a person — such as a refugee from Europe — across the border from Mexico into New Mexico.

Julie, it seems, made it to the United States after leaving from Lisbon, which you’ll remember was a key embarkation point for those leaving Europe if you recall the movie Casablanca. Remember? That was the next stop for people trying to leave, if they could catch the plane out of Casablanca, although many of them could not get the proper papers and were forced to wait…and wait…and wait…

The book is one in a line labeled “Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp,” from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Others include Laura, which became the 1944 movie with Gene Tierney; In a Lonely Place, also by Dorothy B. Hughes, and the basis for a 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie; and The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee, featuring a character named Siggy the G-String Salesman.

Classic. Just classic.

The author of Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory was a highlight of the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, which draws thousands of book fans to Borough Hall and its plaza on a Sunday each September.

Dandicat talked a little bit about how the internet affects the writing life.It used to be that your editor would send you a stack of reviews, she said. And if the editor was nice, the negative ones would be left out. Now things are different.

“Now if even a child in Budapest writes about you in your blog, somebody forwards it to you,” she said.

So presumably, she’ll be getting this post. (Heck, if she’s getting posts from some kid in Hungary, it’s almost embarrassing if she doesn’t see this one.)

The book festival is a feast for serious readers. There I saw Pete Hamill read a pretty stirring scene from his book Snow in August, and sat in on discussions about hoaxes and cons and how Facebook, Twitter and other incarnations of new media are changing the writing world. (That was separate from the Dandicat talk, but it’s a theme that’s hard to get away from.)

I also picked up a book from a line of re-issued pulp novels written by women.

Dandicat talked about her life. When she came to Brooklyn from Haiti at age 12, all she had to show her what it was like here was a photo of her uncle in a large coat, leaning on a car covered with snow. She remembered flying over New York City, seeing all the lights and thinking she would be so busy here, she’d never have time to write to anyone.

At that time, AIDS was a fairly new fear — and Hatians were pegged as one group among which the disease was rampant. Dandicat recalled Hatian students being beating up, called “AIDS people,” or “boat people.”

“It wasn’t a fun time to go to school,” she said.

Appearing before a crowd that filled the auditorium at St. Francis College, which holds about 350, she read from a section called “Transitions” from her 2007 memoir, Brother, I’m Dying. It relates the late phase of her pregnancy with her daughter, and how she came to realize that her daughter would be gradually separating from her for the rest of her life.

The scene Hamill read was about an immigrant rabbi and an 11-year-old non-Jewish boy who has befriended him, both going to Ebbets Field to see Jackie Robinson play, and marveling at the vast diversity of the fans coming together to watch baseball.

Not everything was great, of course. Hamill shared the stage with two other writers — Jacqueline Bishop, who read poems about a love affair from a collection called Snapshots from Istanbul, and some guy I don’t want to mention because I thought was kind of boring.

Listening to the talk “Literature in the Digital Age” was a bit depressing, raising the question: Will people continue to read words on a page, when there are Web pages to surf, and interactive activities like Facebook and Twitter.

“Isn’t a good story enough?” asked John Freeman, acting editor of Granta, at one point.

It wasn’t certain that the answer to that question would be “yes.” But Dwight Gardner, the New York Times book critic pointed to a study by the National Endowment for the Arts showing that literary reading has climbed about 4 percentage points in recent years.

(I’ll look more at that study in a subsequent post.)

As for those bells and whistles, Gardner said, “I fear that those things may push away as many readers as they pull in.”

The talks are not the only reason to hit the book fest. You can find all kinds of books from small publishing houses. I picked up “The Blackbirder,” a re-issued 1943 noir novel written by Dorothy B. Hughes, a crime writer in the 1940s and 1950s.

Yes, were women writing pulp and noir fiction in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

I admit, I didn’t know. Now I do.

And that’s why I go to the book festival every year.

So, Edwidge, how’d I do?

Others include Jonathan Lethem, who is always there, Francine Prose and a host of others. Check out a full list on the site. (Click on the “AUTHORS” bar in the upper left corner.) And when you do, let us know which ones are your faves.

It takes places this Sunday, a fairly easy subway ride from Grand Central Terminal on the 4 train if you don’t want to drive. The writers appear in panel discussions on a wide range of topics. Ones I’ve seen in the past include a talk with Lethem and Jonathan Safran Foer about why European books don’t do as well in the United States as American books do across the Atlantic and a discussion with Richard Price on how a novelist adjusts to writing for movies or television.

They also feature trivia contests anyone can enter. (I got knocked out in the second round two years ago) and other events.

Of course, they don’t miss the opportunity to sell you books. The authors take time to sit at a signing table where you can bring their books (which you buy nearby) to be signed.

All the events are free, but you have to stand on line for tickets starting an hour before each session. If you’re trying to see a top author — think Dandicatt — prepare to spend the hour before waiting.

But, while Valiant serves as one of King Arthur’s Round Table knights, he was at the center of a notorious crime here in Westchester in the more modern era of the late 1980s. Back then, original Prince Valiant artwork was held at the Museum of Cartoon Art, which occupied a castle (yes, a castle) in Rye Brook.

In spring, 1989, it was discovered that some of the Valiant artwork was missing, along with some original Dick Tracy panels. A curator, Sherman Krisher, was later convicted of stealing more than 100 cartoon panels worth about $50,000. The museum eventually got about half the panels back. Krisher was ordered to pay $45,000 in restitution and perform 500 hours of community service.

The museum operated in Rye Brook from 1979 to 1992, when it closed for a move to Boca Raton, Fla.

The new book, from www.fantagraphics.com, is called “Prince Valiant, Vol. 1: 1937-1938.”

Here’s a column on it from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The real-life Harry is the son of David Letterman, and, because we just love making local references here at The Journal News/lohud.com, custom requires that I tell you Letterman is a North Salem resident. (He’s also known for his work in television.)

Harry and Horsie was written by Katie Van Camp, a former nanny to Harry. You can find a USA Today article about the book here.

If you want, you can suggest the Top Ten reasons parents should read the book to their kids.

AP photo/Evan Agostini

James King, author of the upcoming Bill Warrington’s Last Chance lives in Wilton, Conn., but he wrote much of the novel while enrolled in the graduate writing program at Manhattanville College in Purchase.

Full disclosure here: I know Jim. I attended the Manhattanville program, too, and Jim and I took the non-fiction class together. A 54-year-old freelance corporate communications writer, he’s a well-liked, low-key guy. And the non-fiction pieces he wrote were highlights of the class.

In fact, there’s more. I voted for King’s book in the contest, which is run by Amazon.com and which gets the winning book published. And I can say that I cast the vote fairly. I read a few pages from his book and from each of the other two finalists and felt that King’s was the best.

A few days ago, I talked to him about winning the contest, and about his book. It’s about a man who obviously is suffering from some unnamed form of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease, and is trying to reconnect with his children. He decides the best way to do this is to kidnap his granddaughter.

I caught up with King as he was making final line edits on the book for Penguin Books.

He said the title character is based on a neighbor, a “crusty, old New England type of peronality. A real character.”

The neighbor is not suffering from dementia, but King took notice when the guy’s house “which he had built with his own hands, started to fall apart around him.”

When the novel hits bookshelves a year from now — it takes a lot longer than he expected — it will be the first novel King will have published. But it’s not the first he’s written. Three more sit in a drawer. He said he’s come close to getting published in the past, “if you can say that getting a very detailed…rejection” is coming close.

Anyone who tries to publish fiction knows the frustration and disappointment it can bring. King kept trying.

“I guess I’m just a stubborn Irishman,” King said. “I wouldn’t give up.”

He enrolled in the Manhattanville program to work on Bill Harrington’s Last Chance, and he wrote the bulk of it in a novel-writing class given by instructor John Herman, which King took twice. But he benefited from a variety of classes at in the program, he said.

“You study lots of different forms and you learn the importance of word choice, all the critical components,” he said. “Getting that from several different perspectives, I think, was valuable for me.”

As for the three novels he wrote previously:

“The other completed novels, I think, will remain in the drawer,” he said.

It happens that I’ve just started reading some Calvino, the Italian author. (The back of one book jacket calls im “Italy’s most brilliant modern writer.” He lived from 1923 to 1985.) And in that volume, If on a winter’s night a traveler, he writes about the pleasure of buying a new book.

I should point out that he was specifically writing about the pleasure of buying his new book. So, clearly, he would agree with that sentiment on the back cover.

Anyway, the passage can apply to any new book which you just have to own, passing up all the other items in the bookstore for just that one purchase. Here’s what he says:

You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you, but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an objest fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until the veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which, having been new once, will continue to be so.

(He published the book in 1979; the English translation came two years later.)

So. That’s Calvino’s two cents on the topic.

Any more?

I was raised by parents who lived through The Great Depression and who therefore scrutinized every purchase, a skill that’s suddenly in vogue again.

For me, then, books have always been a guilty purchase. After all, doesn’t the library have enough to read?

And yet, I do buy books.

So we’re starting a debate here. Is it better to buy your books or borrow them?

I mean, I love libraries. But borrowing a book is not the same as holding a volume, smelling those pages freshly minted and printed, knowing that the little treasure is yours to read at your own pace, to loan to others, to put on a shelf and pull out in the middle of some distant night when you’re trying to remember that turn of phrase or that one description that stayed with you.

So I buy books, but sparingly. My one-bedroom place can hardly hold more than the 1,000-plus books already packed on my shelves, stacked on a steamer trunk and spilling onto the floor.

(As an aspiring author, I absolutely want other people to buy plenty of books. And when I do buy a new novel, spending $16 I could be saving for the many car repair bills I pay, I also feel that I’m paying into the writers’ karma.)

A few hundred years ago, a Dutch scholar named Desiderius Erasmus made his opinion clear:

“When I get a little money, I buy books;
and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”

He was probably pretty hungry a lot of the time, and we can only imagine what it was like to sit next to him at work, what with him wearing the same clothes all the time. But then, he lived from 1466 to 1536, so we don’t have to worry about it.

I want to know what people think now.

Your thoughts?

Check out this recent article on the site that takes a shot at The Brothers Karamazov, or, more precisely, at people who pretend to have read the Brothers K. The headline: “Film Adaptation Of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book.”

You have to love the photo, too…

The Onion writing staff is almost uncanny in its ability to skewer our quirks in ways that often leave you thinking, “Yeah, I’m guilty of that.” Here, they may have given us (and by “us,” I mean “me, personally”) too much credit. The article suggests that people stop reading the book after about 142 pages.

I cashed out after 70 or 80 pages. But I’m going back to read it all someday, I swear.

Anyway, the article is pretty funny. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the full piece here.