Book News, In Brief

Sunday, the Associated Press announced that 'Brief Books Are In,' prompting lazy writers everywhere to rush to their local UPS stores with their bare bones manuscripts. The only problem? The AP was talking about nonfiction historical biographies penned by established celebrity scribes. In other words, y'all just wasted a lot of time and money on overnight Monday delivery.

The Comics Reporter has posted his list of The Twenty-Five Stories To Remember: 2007. Regular readers of the CR will be none too surprised to see that editor Tom Spurgeon has put the controversy over the Danish Muhammed cartoons at number one. Dude eats that story up like Wimpy does hamburgers.

Friday we had a news bit 'bout Asiana Airlines offering audiobooks on their flights. Today we've got some similar news, but located a hell of a lot closer to Inkwell HQ. According to the Educated Quest, US Airways has joined with RIF (Reading Is Fundamental) to launch a new kids' literacy campaign, 'Fly With US, Read With Kids.' The campaign gives a free copy of Lucy’s Cousins’ Come Fly with Maisy to pint sized passengers traveling domestically during the month of March.

In related news, RIF’s 'Read with Kids Challenge' continues through May. The 'challenge' here is to get parents to spend more time reading with their kids, with a cumulative goal of one million minutes. Interested parties are encouraged to log their time on the RIF website. One lucky family will win a vacation to Walt Disney World, where no one is required to read anything, ever.

Enough RIF, onto WIF (Writer is fraudulent):
"Eleven years after the publication of her best-selling Holocaust memoir - a heartwarming tale of a small Jewish girl trekking across Europe and living with wolves - Massachusetts author Misha Defonseca admitted the whole story was a hoax. In a statement issued by her Belgian lawyer, Defonseca, whose book, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, has been translated into 18 languages and is the basis for a new French movie, Survivre avec les Loups (Surviving With the Wolves), confessed that she is not Jewish and that she spent the war safely in Brussels."
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