A Brief History of Jesus

We know about Stephen Hawking's famous book about time. Now comes Mark's six verses about Jesus.

Long novels -- 700 or more pages -- are making a comeback. At least, that's a conclusion you might come to, judging from the books that are dominating book festivals and publishers' lists of late. As one example, little over a year ago, New York publishers engaged in a bidding war over Garth Risk Halberg's debut novel City on Fire, which runs 900 pages. Knopf won the bid, paying nearly $2 million for the manuscript.

That book will join other recent fiction tomes, including David Peace's Red or Dead (720 pages), Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (784 pages), Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (832 pages), Richard House's The Kills (1,002 pages) and others.

This return of big books is good news if you're looking for a relaxed way to spend leisure time, you enjoy long tales or you want something to balance the brevity of your Twitter feeds. "Long-form story-telling," says Ong Sor Fern writing in The Straits Times, "... allows for the kind of luxuriant wallowing in an alternative universe, which is ...