Weekend Links

The BEA -- Book Expo America -- takes place this week in New York City. For those of you not lucky enough to find yourself in the humid confines of the Big Apple hustling your thinly veiled memoirs to uninterested agents, publishers and booksellers, BookExpoCast is posting podcasts (audio interviews) featuring some of the authors and media mavens who will be attending. A few of the folks included are...

Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling The Kite Runner as well as the new book A Thousand Splendid Suns. In this podcast, he discusses the pressure to follow-up a successful debut novel, as well as the excitement leading up to his first BEA.

Chris Anderson,the editor-in-chief of WIRED and the author of The Long Tail. In this podcast, Anderson gives a preview of the two sessions he’ll be involved with at BEA. “Giving it Away: Free Lunch or Unrealized Opportunity” addresses the pros and cons of supplementing the sale of a book with free content. During “Upfront & Unscripted: Ken Lombard, President, Starbucks Entertainment,” Anderson and Lombard will discuss how the innovative coffee seller has moved into the realm of book and music retail.

Alice Sebold, best-selling author of Lucky and The Lovely Bones. In this podcast, she discusses her new book, The Almost Moon.


Still in a New York state of mind? Don DeLillo's new 9-11 novel, Falling Man, is positively reviewed in the New York Times, as well as the Guardian UK. To read the first chapter yourself, click here.


via Wired:
On the other side of the country, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum opens its exhibit, Tezuka: Marvel of Manga, this weekend. The exhibit "features more than 200 of Tezuka's original drawings, as well as a manga lounge for browsing shelves of cartoons, photos of cosplay events (where participants dress as their favorite characters) and musical performances of popular anime and video game music." This article by Lisa Katayama delves briefly into the genius of Osamu Tezuka, the "quirky intellectual who had a near photographic memory, a medical degree and an obsession with classic Disney movies" who, through the mediums of comics and cartoons, "explored profound themes that were often way ahead of their time -- pacifism, civil rights, man versus machine, artificial intelligence and urban high-rise architecture." All this, and he created Astro Boy, too!