Book News, In Brief

Fans of Salman Rushdie's most recent novel, The Enchantress of Florence, might want to head on over to Star-ecentral.com. They've convinced Rushdie to reveal 'the roots' of the people and places found he describes in the book.

Darwyn Cooke's next comics project has been announced. It's a series of comic book adaptations of Donald Westlake's Parker crime novels. As a big fan of Cooke's work on Catwoman (a fantastic crime comic while Ed Brubaker was writing it), this comes as good news to me.

While Americans are stuffing their mouths with fake fangs in anticipation of August's release of Before Dawn, the rest of the world is catching up on our old bestsellers. Japan has just gotten their copies of Harry Potter and the Disappointing Flashforward Ending, while Iranians are reading Persian translations of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the books of motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, and the writings of Rhonda Byrne (author of The Secret). It's a small world (full of needy, gullible people) after all.