Stephen King has settled down a bit from the days when he would wipe out most of the world's population with a flu bug just to set the stage for his real story. But once in a while he still likes to work on a big canvas and take, say, a small-to-middling Maine town and put it through the wrath of God.

Book-loving NPR listeners cast some 136,000 votes in the Best Beach Books Ever poll. These tomes came out on top.

Francine Prose's "Anne Frank" is, in effect, a biography of the book. Reviewers, scholars and teachers have encouraged readers of "The Diary of Anne Frank" to approach the book in many ways - as memoir, inspiration, history, Holocaust narrative or, simply, a diary of a girl living in extraordinary times. But Prose offers another way of reading "The Diary" - she examines it as a literary work and looks at Anne Frank as an artist.