Mo' Book News!

Actress/mythical beauty Pam Grier (Jackie Brown, Coffy) is planning to pen a tell-all memoir, due for release in 2010. This is destined to be awesome, and should be formatted in the 'coffee table' size, if only for the sake of the accompanying photos.

Writer/director Kevin Smith is taking another stab at writing comic books -- and this time he promises to finish! Smith announced his three issue Batman mini-series at Comicon, silencing the naysayers when it was announced that he'd already turned in the scripts for all three books.

After successfully adapting The Dark Tower to comics, Stephen King and Marvel are teaming up again, this time on a previously unpublished work by King, N. Unlike The Dark Tower, though, N is not going to done in the traditional ink and paper format (well, not at first, anyway). It's going to be comics via cell phone.

Book News, In Brief

Everybody's having a Breaking Dawn midnight release party (including us), but no one knows how many people are actually gonna show up. Not even the bookstore where Stephenie Meyer does routine signings.

Here's a cool link care of Rare Book News: The 25 Most Modern Libraries. So what makes a library modern? Among other things: cutting edge architecture; open areas; online resources; and, at the Malmo City Library, "the ability to check out a person for a 45-minute chat in an attempt to promote understanding and break down stereotypes." How chic!

Simon & Schuster has filed lawsuits against rappers Lil Kim and Foxy Brown over books that they were supposed to write, but never did. Simon & Schuster gave Lil Kim $40,000 in 2003 for a novel that was to be finished the following year, while Brown was paid $75,000 in 2005 to pen her autobiography. (Wait, Foxy Brown got paid more than Lil Kim? Simon & Schuster might want to glace at the Billboard charts every now and again.)

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.

Notable Comics Links

PopCultureShock provides a 2008 Midterm Report Card (Or, The Best Manga of the First Half of 2008).

More Watchmen film tid-bits: A photo of the 1940's Minutemen, and a Vargas-style painting of Carla Gugino as the Silk Spectre.

Buy the single issues or wait for the trade? And what about those comics where you can't wait for the trade, but know you're going to end up buying it when it comes out anyway? ComicsComics argues for the floppy, The ADD Blog takes the trade's side. (Shout-outs to Gilbert Hernandez' recently completed Speak of the Devil mini-series, the book that provoked this back-and-forth.)

Comicon 2008 is being this week in San Diego, and for those of us too poor to go, the online updates are a-plenty. Here are just a sampling of links:
Jog
Got Cheeks
Newsarama
Comics Reporter
Drawn & Quarterly
Entertainment Earth Daily

Book News, In Brief

One book club has found a decidedly un-democratic way of choosing their next book: drinking contests.

Best selling 'author'/sex tape star Katie Price admits "I didn't write my books"...at the release party for her third book!

Actor Robert Downey Jr. has returned the advance he was given for his autobiography. With his recent career resurgence, he's hesitant to type the words 'The End.'

Bookstores everywhere are gearing up for the release of Breaking Dawn, and The Inkwell is no different. If you're vacationing in Falmouth (or anywhere on Cape Cod, for that matter) Friday, August 1st, stop by our store for the midnight release party that we're having. We'll have food, drink, costume contests, trivia games, and -- most importantly -- plenty of copies of the book.

Book News, In Brief

Everybody knows that reading is a solitary activity. It's just that Amazon knows how to market this fact better than the rest of us. They've come up with yet another way to keep agoraphobic readers indoors and out of our stores: TiVo and Amazon have partnered to provide consumers with the ability to purchase physical products from Amazon.com on their TVs, using their TiVo remote control.

Care to read a candid comics creating tutorial hosted by the master himself? Alan Moore invited website L'Essaim Victorieux Des Mouches D'eau to his Northampton home for an extensive chat about his writing process.

Lists, via The Guardian UK:
The top 10 psychedelic non-fiction
The top 10 books about wine
Blur's Alex James's top 10 books
Dai Smith's top 10 Welsh alternatives to Dylan Thomas
Julia Golding's top 10 characters from children's historical fiction
Rachel Seiffert's top 10 books about troubled families
Wesley Stace's top 10 ventriloquism books
Sally Beauman's top 10 novels with a powerful sense of place

Tank Girl Artist Jamie Hewlett Profiled in da Guardian UK

The intro:
His is the pen behind Eighties comic-strip heroine Tank Girl, virtual band Gorillaz and the opera Monkey - and soon you'll be seeing his animated title sequence for the Olympics on TV. He tells Mark Kermode how a shy boy turned into a great graphic art rebel...

Click here to read the whole shebang.

Click here for their specially prepared In pictures: Jamie Hewlett designs past and present.

Book News, In Brief

Florida man wins Hemingway look-alike contest. Yeah, but did he smell like booze and cat pee?

DC Comics' dumb idea #473548237: They're crappily converting their best comics (Mad Love, Watchmen, etc.) into semi-animated slide shows for viewing on ipods and cellphones. Woo-hoo! They've found yet another way to f**k with the work of their authors and artists!

Publishers Weekly's got the bad news: R.I.P. Lyall Watson and Anatoly I. Pristavkin. I never knew (or heard of) ye, but I'm sure someone misses you...somewhere.

Oh, yeah -- and R.I.P. "deep reading," too. The obituary for this one comes courtesy of the Guardian UK.