NEW YORK — It IS 90 degrees on a crisp fall day, 89% humidity. One-hundred thousand refugees are stranded in Texas, courtesy of Hurricane Ike. Could just be a bad day. Then again, it could be something worse.

SARATOGA, WYO. — On bridge street, few shopkeepers know the name Annie Proulx. But they sure know the title of her most famous short story, "Brokeback Mountain."

BOSTON — Falling in love with a writer requires commitment; the long haul, thick and thin. They get old, you get old. The relationship waxes and wanes. Most readers can recall times of perfect synchronicity — when the book was the necessary enzyme, the catalyst, the missing piece. "Black Tickets," Jayne Anne Phillips' first collection of stories, published in 1979, was, for more than one earnest English major, such a book.

Manhattan in a winter storm seems galaxies away from Bonnard's bright interiors. I carry an exhibition catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Elie Wiesel's office in Midtown.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Spring is impossibly verdant in Raleigh, so lush it's steamy. The path to the door of Reynolds Price's house in the woods is scattered with beechnuts. Tree frogs babble, the screen door slams, somewhere in the pond outside the kitchen an old snapping turtle raises its head. It's hard not to think of the song "Copperline" which Price wrote with his friend and fellow North Carolinian, James Taylor.

BRISTOL, MAINE — Tracy Kidder's 2003 book, "Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World," inspired legions of young people to go out and do something for the poor and disenfranchised. It also lighted a fire under donors — the checks came pouring in to Farmer's Boston-based organization, Partners in Health, which builds medical clinics in poor communities around the world.

SOUTH BERWICK, MAINE — For a private writer, Nicholson Baker has caused his share of flaps. Wasn't it his novel "Vox" that Monica Lewinsky gave to President Clinton? Didn't his article "Discards" point the finger at librarians who threw away card catalogs and back issues of newspapers? What about his last book, "Human Smoke," which portrayed FDR and Churchill as warmongers? Just this summer, from the Quaker farmhouse here where he lives with his family, he wrote a piece about the Kindle that has had many readers screaming, "Luddite!" Just goes to show: You can take the literary anecdote out of the man, but you can't take the man out of the literary anecdote.

Richard Dawkins, best known as the author of "The Selfish Gene" (1976) and "The God Delusion" (2006), is at the Atheist Alliance International Convention in Burbank to discuss his new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" (Free Press: 470 pp., $30), but he can't get from one banquet hall to the next without someone asking to take a picture with him.

PRINCETON, N.J. — There's a fault line opening in John McPhee. After 28 books and countless essays, he is giving us, bit by bit, a more personal sense of who he is. In a recent, beautiful piece for the New Yorker, he combined an essay on pickerel with memories of his father's death and a lasting image of his father's bamboo fishing rod. The piece took many readers by surprise — not the style, which was the same seamless combination of carefully chosen details and information, but the presence of the author, blinking in full glare. According to McPhee, who turns 79 next month, he was as surprised as anyone to find himself hooked by memories, exposed.