Eldredge ATL

Halloween won’t officially be over in Atlanta this year until thousands of zombie fans get to pick the brains of some of their favorite Walking Dead stars at the city’s inaugural Walker Stalker Con.

Arriving at Tuesday’s advance screening of Guardians of the Galaxy, the latest superhero summer popcorn movie from Marvel Studios, two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou didn’t duck out for dinner with studio reps once the lights went down. Instead, Hounsou donned his 3D glasses, and settled into a seat with a large bottle of water and a bag of popcorn to watch the two-hour intergalactic comic book come to life. Hounsou is part of an ensemble cast that includes Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, The Walking Dead’s Michael Rooker, Lee Pace, John C. Reilly, and Glenn Close. Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel lend their voices to the flick, portraying mutant, mouthy raccoon Rocket, and Groot, a walking, talking tree with a severely limited vocabulary.

Looking red carpet ready in a red dress and matching lipstick, Davis, standing in front of the anchor desk, smiled and told viewers: "I have seen and heard and reported on stories from Bankhead to Buckhead to the White House. There have been awards, honors and accolades. There have also been challenges, disappointments and stumbles. But yea, though I walk through the valley, with God's help, I made it though. And that's what I want you to know. I am blessed. So, it is with a heavy heart that I announce I am officially retiring from Fox 5 as I look ahead to a new chapter in my life. So, with much love and appreciation, I say thank you for your love and support."

For the first time in 12 years, longtime Atlanta readers were greeted by an old friend at the Atlanta Press Club Holiday Author Party at 200 Peachtree Street downtown Tuesday night — Atlanta writer Kathy Hogan Trocheck. OK, so technically, Trocheck is an annual attendee at the event, signing her yearly novel under her New York Times best-selling pen name Mary Kay Andrews (her latest release in hardback is "Spring Fever"). But before achieving fame with her Southern-accented fiction, Trocheck wrote 10 mysteries under her own name, most of them starring Callahan Garrity, a former Atlanta Police Department cop turned private eye and The House Mouse house cleaning business owner.

The art world can be cruel. While critics and curators salivate over the fresh crop of art school grads, an older generation of artists gets lost in the shuffle.

Veteran novelist and former Atlanta magazine staffer Anne Rivers Siddons sets her eighteenth novel, Burnt Mountain (Grand Central Publishing), in the metro area. These days Siddons divides her time between Maine and coastal South Carolina, but Atlanta “is burned into my heart and retinas,” she says. “I’ve kept all I know of it.” Indeed, Siddons captures the lush, old-money neighborhoods and the prickly Perimeter wars—inside or out?—with clear affection. “There are maybe ten small towns and communities orbiting Atlanta like dwarf moons,” she writes. “Most of them are close enough to the city to lie, figuratively, under its canopy, like fruit dropped from a great tree.” Burnt Mountain is steeped in Celtic myth, loss, and breathtaking betrayal. Thayer Wentworth grows up a tomboy in a proper family. In one magical summer at camp, she meets her first love and has her first heartbreak. Years later she marries Aengus O’Neill, an Irish professor with “banked-fire blue” eyes that only hint of the dark magic to come. Throughout Thayer’s life, her twisted relationship with her mother provides a powerful undertow. Siddons, now seventy-five, sometimes lays the drama on pretty thick, but her skill at drawing nuanced characters, painting beautiful scenes, and simply writing perfect sentences is on full display here.

Daniel Black Daniel Black’s third novel—after They Tell Me of a Home and

Dear Winnipeggers,   Congrats! You got yourselves a hockey team—again. Kind of wish it wasn’t ours. But here we are.   While there are many good and devoted fans who are distraught we’re losing the Thrashers, for most of us their departure is like se

 Eight-year-old Matthew Morris confesses to having a fear of coyotes and a loathing of spinach, and he answers questions with a focused, “Yes, sir.” But give him a beat and put him in shades and a leather jacket, and he becomes MattyB—a “chyeah”-saying emcee who agilely chirps that he’s hotter than gumbo.