Book News, In Brief

In France, book fairs are da bomb, yo. Via AP: A bomb threat on Sunday targeted the Paris book fair, forcing organisers to evacuate visitors to the literary event, which this year is honouring Israeli writers despite a Muslim boycott, police said.

Is former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto the next memoirist to have her writing's validity called into question? Via AP: The lawyer for a suspect arrested in a deadly attack on a rally for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said Sunday he would try to halt sales of her memoir because he believed it wrongly implicated his client in a plot to kill her.

Well, it's less embarrassing than the time they opened Disneyland before the asphalt had cooled. Via The Bennington Banner: The Northshire Bookstore held an official launch on Thursday of The Espresso Book Machine, a new type of technology expected to revolutionize the publishing industry, but unfortunately, it (was) broken.

Note to authors doubling as fighter pilots: make sure your name and bibliography are clearly visible to other pilots. It just might save your life. Via The Earth Times: The German pilot who shot down the plane carrying Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of the beloved book Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), said he deeply regretted his act, the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche reported on Sunday. "If I had known who was in front of me, I would never have shot. Not him!"