Book News, In Brief

This should come as a surprise to no one but newborn babies and recently lapsed Amish: JK Rowling's latest offering, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, has broken all records to become the fastest selling book of 2008.

Abdulkarim Soroush must have a death wish, a fatal disease, or both. Why else would "Iran's leading public intellectual" publicly challenge the divinity of the Koran? Didn't he learn anything from those Danish dudes and their inflammatory (as in: houses catching fire, cars exploding, etc.) cartoons?

A graduation speech that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005 is going to be published posthumously as a book next year. The speech, which Wallace delivered to the graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio, runs approximately 150 pages and will be titled, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered On a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life. (No jokes on this one. I loved dude.)