Romance

As far as anybody can tell, the women of Long Island found it first, around Thanksgiving. During their Christmas vacations, they carried it by Kindle to Boca and possibly Aruba, and from there, it ripped its way through Jersey and then the nation's e-readers before landing last week at the very top of the New York Times best-seller list for combined print and e-book sales. It's Fifty Shades of Grey , the sexual-bondage romance novel from first-time author E.L. James, a married British TV executive and mother of two, that's been steaming up e-book readers since its digital publication in May and is about to be released as a trilogy in paperback form, with a first run of 750,000 copies.

NEW YORK - E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, a word-of-mouth romance smash so erotic it's sometimes labeled "mommy porn," has been signed up by a paperback division of Random House Inc. Vintage Books announced Saturday that it had acquired the three books - Fifty Shades of Grey , Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed . E-book editions will be out today, and paperbacks are expected in early April. The novels had been distributed by an Australia-based publisher, the Writer's Coffee Shop Publishing House.

DEAR ABBY: My boyfriend, "Jackson," and I have been in a long-distance relationship for two years. We recently learned that we both have been accepted to our "dream" college, which means we'll live close to each other for the first time. I miss Jackson when we're apart, but I enjoy having the freedom to study, hang out with friends and have "me time" while still being in a happy relationship. From what I have heard, college life is fun, but busy. I love Jackson and want to be with him, but I also want to make new friends and focus on schoolwork.

By virtue of its simple, stylized look - bold lines and color blocks - and effervescent Cuban jazz score, the Spanish animated feature Chico & Rita rises above its routine story of a troubled love affair between talented musicians. The movie opens as the aged Chico (voice of Eman Xor Oña), a Havana bootblack, looks out at the city and flashes back to pre-revolution days when he was a young piano player and ladies' man and fell for alluring songbird Rita (Limara Meneses). Over the following decades, the relationship will have some ups and lots of downs.

ZAGREB, Croatia - What becomes of a garden gnome hurled in fury at a windshield during a stormy breakup? Or a teddy bear that was once a Valentine's Day present? A wedding dress from a marriage gone awry? An ax that smashed through household furniture? All are on display at the Museum of Broken Relationships in the Croatian capital, each with a written testimony telling tales of passion, romance, and heartbreak. On Valentine's Day, visits to the museum almost double.

The endearing romance between troubled teen Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and perpetually young blood-drinker Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) takes a decidedly grown-up turn in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 , which Summit Entertainment is to release at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. The fourth installment in the mega-popular teen vampire romance has Bella and Edward procreate. Their baby, it seems, poses a danger to the Wolf Pack, introducing more hair-raising, tingly conflict.

SAY THIS for Angelina Jolie's foray into directing - she's clearly not in it for the money. Her debut, "In the Land of Blood and Honey," is a grisly, inscrutable psychosexual art film set amid the brutal chaos of the strife in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I'd be surprised if it finds an audience much bigger than the voting body of the Golden Globes, which gave Jolie a best foreign-language-film director nomination a few weeks ago. "Blood and Honey" (in Turkish, the words combine to form "balkan")

DEAR ABBY: I recently met a man I love dearly, but I don't agree with the toys he buys for his 10-year-old son, "Dale. " The boy plays violent video games and is obsessed with guns to the point that we can't leave the house without bringing a toy gun along. The video games he plays (unsupervised) are violent and gory, and rated M (17 and over). Dale is not mature for his age. He's allowed on the Internet without supervision, and I have walked in and caught him surfing naughty pictures.

After a set that drew a standing ovation from the audience at the Keswick Theatre on Saturday night, the Jayhawks opened their encore with "Love Hurts," hewing closely to the immortal version by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. It was a fairly obvious choice for a band credited as a formative influence on the alt-country movement, but it also summed up the 90-minute set's subtext. Led by Mark Olson and Gary Louris, who recently released Mockingbird Time , their first album under the Jayhawks banner in 16 years, they worked the terrain of melancholy romance with single-minded devotion.

* A GIFTED MAN. 8 tonight, CBS 3. * PAN AM. 10 p.m. Sunday, 6ABC.   VIEWERS WHOSE Friday nights haven't been the same since the departure of "Ghost Whisperer" and "Medium" might find a reason to move toward the light of the TV screen again tonight as CBS introduces "A Gifted Man," starring Patrick Wilson ("Angels in America") as a brain surgeon who sees dead people. OK, technically speaking, Michael Holt is only seeing the one dead person - his ex-wife, a free-clinic doctor named Anna Paul ("Contagion's" Jennifer Ehle)