Alice Walker

Prince isn’t alone in taking a certain royal tint to heart. Alice Walker’s first and still most prominent novel, The Color Purple, earned her a well-deserved Pulitzer and a well-meaning film adaptation by Steven Spielberg. Later this year, it’ll debut as a musical in Atlanta before hitting Broadway. Her new novel, Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart, available April 20, has a successful-author protagonist who, in the throes of mid-life crisis, embarks on a spiritual quest involving Earth-motherhood and hallucinogenic-aided shamanism. Walker’s questing metaphysics in the Carlos Casteneda vein is sitting uneasily with the national lit-crit establishment, which seems to think that this time around it’s her prose that’s the color purple. 600 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, (612) 339-4859, www.bordersstores.com