Publisher Ann Godoff, who helped shape modern American book culture and launched many bestsellers, has died at age 76.

Lear deBessonet, the new artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, has chosen “Ragtime” as her first show.

Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who helped reset the rules of Hollywood as co-creator of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and later wrote and directed the sensitive domestic dramas “Kramer vs.

Jason Epstein, a publishing innovator and bon vivant who helped put the classics in paperback, co-founded The New York Review of Books and worked with such novelists as E.