Arts

Deborah Harkness is not only an enormously successful novelist who writes about trendy things like vampires. She's also a respected historian of science — a professor at the University of Southern California — and a wine expert.

In fact there's a lot of wine appreciation in Harkness' breakthrough novel, A Discovery of Witches. Her academic work involves the study of alchemy — the transformation of matter. She says wine is like alchemy, too.

Novelist Jess Walter's most recent novel is Beautiful Ruins.

At dawn, the sun curls across the lake's placid surface like a twist of lemon on a gin martini. Easing into my kayak on this glacier-cut, 12,000-year-old lake, I feel as I always do on its water: alone in the world.

Ask Me Another's grand prize winners have walked away with some enviable, one-of-a-kind gifts, which were chosen and presented by none other than their show's Mystery Guest.

Here are some of the season's best prizes:

Robert Longfellow, the auspiciously named playwright at the center of Collaborator, was at one point good enough to be sincerely called "the voice of his generation." What a convenient shortcut for a film about a writer! The moniker says everything — he's basically Arthur Miller, see? — without his needing to say anything. It doesn't matter what the man wrote, only that people thought it was grand.