“What separates me from someone in the streets of Kabul is such a thin line,” says the Afghan-American author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” ”What I have is, in many ways, an undeserved gift.”

His amazing run continued Tuesday night as he appeared before an overflow crowd at the Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Union Square. With some 300 seated before him, and dozens more watching on a video screen a floor below, Hosseini spoke for around 40 minutes about his new novel, “And the Mountains Echoed.” The book, published Tuesday, will likely become one of the summer’s favourite reads. It has received admiring reviews and reached the top 10 on Amazon.com well before its official release.

Hosseini, 48, is slightly greyer since “A Thousand Splendid Suns” came out six years ago. He was relaxed and chatty Tuesday, not surprising for a man who turned up in a plaid shirt and jeans, as if dropping in on a neighbour for a weekend visit.

Like his previous novels, “And the Mountains Echoed” features Afghan characters and tells a story about families, this one spanning decades and generations. The title was inspired by a William Blake line, “And all the hills echoed,” with “hills” changed to “mountains” to suit Afghanistan’s imposing terrain. Hosseini didn’t know what the book would be called when he began it, but he did have an image in his mind that had struck him like a “thunderclap” — a man walking across the desert, pulling a wagon behind him, with a 3-year-old girl inside. A boy, around 10, trails them.

“Something about that particular dynamic and image seemed to me so striking and compelling,” he said. Determined to know more about these people he decided the children were siblings, “that they guilelessly adore each other and something difficult is going to happen” in Kabul. He would call the boy Abdullah, and the girl Pari. He would, once again, draw upon old memories of Afghanistan, a country he left as a child.

Hosseini considers the book his most ambitious, with a complex narrative and stops in Paris, San Francisco (the author lives in Northern California) and Greece. He had no idea how the novel would turn out when he started and considers it far harder to describe than “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” which he summarizes as “the struggles of women in Afghanistan over the last 30 years.” But he does know what he wanted to express — how we all are united by loss, by failure, by what we’re missing.

“Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness,” he said. “It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought (we’d have).”

Few authors have enjoyed so many nice surprises. Ten years ago, Hosseini was a doctor who had written stories all of his life but never thought anyone wanted to read them. He was a doctor because he had been poor when his family first moved to the U.S. and he never wanted to be poor again. He wrote “The Kite Runner” out of love, with no plans to publish it, only to see the novel become a word-of-mouth sensation after its 2003 release.

“I more or less stumbled into a writing career,” he said, adding that he was happy to give up medicine. (Meanwhile, he has set up a foundation that provides humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan.

Asked by an audience member which books he had been reading, he mentioned the short story writers George Saunders and Alice Munro. A woman wanted to know how Hosseini was able to get inside the minds of female characters (“I watched a lot of ‘The View,’” Hosseini responded, to much laughter. “I don’t think I ever did tap into what women think. I’m as clueless as any guy in this room.”) The inevitable question about how one becomes a writer was asked by an 8th grader.

“My advice to you is to read a lot,” he said. “And just write, write all the time.”

A spokesman for the 71-year-old singer says Franklin will reschedule two shows and resume her touring schedule in July.

Publicist David Brokaw provided no other details Tuesday.

Franklin announced earlier this month that she would cancel scheduled performances in Chicago and Connecticut this week to undergo medical treatment. She did not specify what type of treatment she was receiving.

Franklin appeared on the season finale of “American Idol” last week via satellite, singing a medley of her hits with the show’s female finalists.

Uriel Landeros had faced felony graffiti and criminal mischief charges accusing him of spray-painting “Woman in a Red Armchair” at the Menil Collection.

Emily Detoto, Landeros’ attorney, said that after negotiating with prosecutors during a court hearing, her client agreed to plead guilty to the graffiti charge in exchange for a minimal prison sentence. The other charge was dropped. Landeros had faced up to 10 years in prison.

Detoto said Landeros, 22, wanted the criminal mischief charge dismissed because he believed “what he did to the painting was not criminal mischief, it was an artistic statement, an expression, much like graffiti art is.”

“He acknowledged what he did was wrong in terms of he caused damage to the painting. But he also understood that a lot of times to make a point you have to go to these extremes,” she said.

The painting was damaged June 13 and a bystander captured the act in a 24-second video that was posted on YouTube. The vandal left behind an image of a bullfighter, a bull and the word “conquista,” the Spanish word for conquest.

Landeros, a U.S. citizen, fled to Mexico after the incident. He surrendered to authorities at the U.S.-Mexico border in January.

“It’s good the judicial process has done its work and come to a conclusion,” said Menil spokesman Vance Muse.

Detoto said there is a good chance her client could be quickly paroled once he is placed into the Texas prison system. He will get credit for the five months in jail he’s already served, and Detoto noted the crime wasn’t violent.

After his release from prison, Landeros plans to return to the University of Houston and finish the one semester he has left to get his bachelor’s degree, Detoto said.

“He plans to continue with his art career. We’re hopeful that he’ll be able to turn a positive out of this experience,” she said.

Muse said the painting’s restoration “is close to completion.” He said no date has been set on when it would be put back on display.

The vandalism charges garnered Landeros national attention, and a Houston art gallery raised the ire of the local art community in October by staging a show of his works.

It was not the first time one of Picasso’s works has been vandalized. In 1999, an escaped mental patient in Amsterdam cut a hole in the middle of his “Woman Nude Before Garden,” a 1956 painting.

Other works of art have also been the target of vandals. In October, a vandal scrawled graffiti on a mural by modern American master Mark Rothko at London’s Tate Modern. The “Mona Lisa” has been attacked several times, including with acid, a rock and even a teacup.

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Follow Juan A. Lozano on Twitter: www.twitter.com/juanlozano70

Others up for prizes at the raucous outdoor bash include East Coast rapper Classified with four nods, and Billy Talent, deadmau5 and Serena Ryder with three apiece.

Demi Lovato, who is also set to perform, is in the running for two prizes while other double nominees include Carly Rae Jepsen, Hedley, Justin Bieber, Metric, the Sheepdogs and Young Empires.

Marianas Trench, meanwhile, seems to be on a bit of a roll. They recently won group of the year at the Juno Awards.

Among the first-time nominees at the MMVAs is “Gangnam Style” hitmaker PSY, who will also co-host the festivities

The MMVAs are set to air live on MuchMusic on June 16.

It’s part of the continuing fallout from his fraud convictions four years ago.

He and business partner Myron Gottlieb served several years in prison for a book-cooking scheme that ultimately resulted in the demise of now-defunct Livent Inc. — the company behind such hits as “Phantom of the Opera” and “Ragtime.”

Drabinsky, who was called to the bar in 1975, has already agreed not to practise law, but now the Law Society of Upper Canada has started “conduct unbecoming of a licensee” proceedings against him.

The allegations are based on his criminal convictions and if the law society discipline panel finds against him the possible penalties include a fine, an order restricting the services he can provide, or revoking his licence.

Drabinsky is also in the midst of fighting his removal from the Order of Canada and the Ontario Securities Commission is reopening its regulatory case against Drabinsky, Gottlieb and a third Livent executive, Gordon Eckstein.

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway announced Patty’s selection Tuesday.

Patty is a five-time Grammy Award winner and longtime resident of Anderson, Ind. She last sang the national anthem at the 500 in 1992. She also performed it in 1987, 1988, 1990 and 1991.

Patty says it’s a “thrill” to return to Indiana and participate in the event that “showcases Indianapolis as one of the best cities in the world.”

Patty has sold more than 11 million albums and is the most decorated female vocalist in contemporary Christian music.

Television networks rushed their big names to the scene, including anchors Brian Williams of NBC’s “Nightly News” and Scott Pelley of the “CBS Evening News.” Both broadcasts were expanded on Tuesday to cover the story, as was ABC’s “World News,” with Diane Sawyer remaining in New York.

Similarly, Shepard Smith of Fox News Channel, Anderson Cooper of CNN and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC led cable news teams on the story. MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” broadcast from Moore, Okla.

For “Today,” in the unaccustomed position of fighting back from the No. 2 spot against ABC’s “Good Morning America,” it marked the third time in recent months that news disrupted special broadcast plans. Savannah Guthrie’s interview with President Barack Obama was virtually forgotten because it happened only hours before the Boston Marathon explosion. And Matt Lauer was poorly positioned in Texas on the day Boston was shut down for the marathon suspect manhunt.

The Oklahoma tornado came in the midst of the NBC show’s “Great American Adventure” road trip, which had the team scheduled to visit five places in five days. They made one, Monday on the beach at Waikiki, and were headed to Yellowstone when executive producer Don Nash was reached in the air and told about the tornado.

“A lot of time and effort went into the Yellowstone visit,” he said. “But, ultimately, we are first and foremost a news program and this was a big news story. In the end, it was an easy choice.”

The planes with Lauer, Guthrie, Natalie Morales, Al Roker and Willie Geist were instead sent further east.

It’s likely that the third visit of the week, to Chicago, will also be cancelled, Nash said. He’s playing it by ear for Thursday’s trip to Orlando, Fla., but said “Today” is determined to keep Friday’s plans to check on recovery progress from Superstorm Sandy at the New Jersey shore as the summer beach season begins.

“It’s the right show to do on a week like this,” Nash said.

While “Good Morning America” did not send its hosts to Oklahoma, weather reporter Sam Champion was well-positioned. He had travelled to Kansas on Sunday to be in place when there were forecasts of severe weather.

“CBS This Morning” co-host Norah O’Donnell travelled to Oklahoma to anchor that network’s extended coverage Tuesday morning.

The building in downtown Halifax was shut down May 7 after the Office of the Fire Marshal ordered the gallery to fix the sprinklers.

None of the collections in the building were damaged.

The gallery is the largest art museum in Atlantic Canada.

Dunwoody police spokesman Timothy Fecht says officers arrested Cozart after responding to a call about illegal drug activity at the Le Méridien hotel just north of Atlanta Monday afternoon. Fecht says officers saw smoke and smelled marijuana wafting from a room.

It wasn’t immediately clear what Cozart was doing in Georgia. Representatives at his booking agency said they didn’t have contact info for an attorney for the 17-year-old Chicago native and didn’t know much about the incident.

Cozart was arrested in January and spent about two months in juvenile detention for violating probation on a weapons conviction. He had received probation for pointing a gun at police in 2012.

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts said Burnett will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Oct. 20 in Washington. A gala performance will feature top names in comedy

The 80-year-old Burnett said she can’t believe she is receiving the prize.

“It’s almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington,” she said in a statement.

Burnett had her breakout on Broadway in “Once Upon a Mattress,” performing at night in 1959 while also appearing in the mornings on TV’s “The Garry Moore Show.” She is best known for her own long-running variety show, “The Carol Burnett Show.” It ran from 1967 to 1978, averaging 30 million viewers a week on CBS. Her guest stars included Lucille Ball, Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Reagan and Betty White.

Kennedy Center Chairman David Rubenstein called Burnett a “unique and beloved entertainer.”

The Mark Twain Prize honours people who have an impact on American society in the tradition of Samuel Clemens, better known as Twain, as a social commentator and satirist. Previous honorees include Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, Tina Fey and Ellen DeGeneres, who won last year.

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Kennedy Center: http://www.kennedy-centre.org

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Follow Brett Zongker online at https://twitter.com/DCArtBeat