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adapting The Dark Tower to comics, Stephen King and Marvel are teaming up again, this time on a previously unpublished work by King, N. Unlike The Dark Tower, though, N is not going to done in the traditional ink and paper format (well, not at first, anyway).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

Watchmen Trailer Premiers Tomorrow Today

Click here to view (but be patient, it may take a minute or two).
(Image swiped from CHUD.com)

Book News, In Brief

The Wall Street Journal forgets its raison d'etre, recommending people borrow from libraries instead of buying at bookstores. Ah, but this'll learn 'em...

Instant karma! Financial woes are forcing The Wall Street Journal to cut 50 editing positions. Note to WSJ: Maybe nobody's buying your paper cuz they're reading it in the library.

Scandal! David Hessayon, author of the 50 million-selling Expert series (Gardening for Dummies, but loftier), has announced that "tending his own roses and shrubs no longer gives him pleasure." I betcha he still loves harvesting the ol' money tree, though.

Fanfic makes good. George Norman Lippert's James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing, an unofficial sequel to the Harry Potter series, has not only inspired a YouTube film adaptation and its own fanfic spin-offs, it has received J.K. Rowling's blessing as well. Lippert's next James Potter book, The Curse of the Gatekeeper, hits the net this September.

Book News, In Brief

The Comics Reporter admits that this is nearly impossible to verify, but is Google censoring pro-Palestinian comics?

Kiplinger.com has an article up comparing the Kindle to the Sony Reader. While Sony wins in all of the aesthetic categories, the Kindle holds more and has wireless options. But in the end, Kiplinger says that both e-books "cost too much for what they deliver."

Via The Boston Globe: "In a woeful time for book publishing, when sales are stagnant and reading for pleasure is declining, an unlikely first novel is climbing bestseller lists and causing a sensation. To the astonishment of writers, editors, and booksellers, David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is proving that readers can still fall hard for an old-fashioned literary epic by someone they've never heard of..."

Via Boing Boing: "This marvellous paperback chair is on display at Myopic Books in Providence Rhode Island...ZOMG I wish this was for sale."

Re: Race & Class

A janitor at Purdue University was observed reading a book about a 1924 riot between Notre Dame students and the KKK. The University charged him with racial harassment, likening it to reading porn at work(?!). Assorted civil liberties groups took up the cause, quoting from that pesky 'free speech' thingamabob, and now, almost a year later, the University has apologized...but only after making it clear to EVERYONE that they are committed to free speech.

Except where history books about unlikable hate groups are concerned.

Oh, and where porn is concerned.

But every other type of free speech? They're totally cool with those.

Quick side thought: Had it been a student at Purdue who was seen reading this book, it would've been no big thing. Students are intellectuals, naturally curious about matters of history and/or social unrest. But a janitor? Well, he had to be an ignorant racist.

That's class!

For the longer, less biased version of this story, click here.

Smart People Prefer 1984 To Anything B.C., J.C.

Via Publisher's Weekly:
Disinformation Readers Pick Favorites
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 7/14/2008 1:03:00 PM
Favorite book lists vary widely, as Sara Nelson points out in this week’s PW. Her editorial comments on two recent polls: one recent by Harris that queried just over 2,500 Americans about their favorite books and found the top two were the Bible and Gone with the Wind; and another by Disinformation.com that found the top two were Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Ralph Bernardo, managing editor at Disinformation, explained the results...Bernardo said Disinformation’s readership is diverse geographically, economically and racially; however, the group tends to more highly educated than the general population. Disinformation’s and Harris’s polls did share some favorites: both included Lord of the Rings, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Catcher in the Rye.

To read the complete article, click here.

Book News, In Brief

Barnes & Noble bucks the boutique bookstore trend, actually expanding their one and only rare books store.

Where are they now? The Guardian UK tracks down some high profile literary award winners who've disappeared from the public eye.

These two links were swiped from Fantagrapics' FLOG blog: Steve Ditko in Entertainment Weekly and Charles Burns in The New Yorker.

MichelleInkwell thinks we're gonna damage our lit cred by posting this one, so view it quick -- before she edits this. The Mortal Kombat vs. DC Comics video game trailer is online.

Author Du Jour: Jennifer Haigh

Biography
(Stolen whole from Wikipedia)
Jennifer Wasilko Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer. Her critically acclaimed novel Mrs. Kimble (2003) won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Outstanding First Fiction.
Haigh was born in Barnesboro, PA, and is a 1990 graduate of Dickinson College. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2002. Her short stories have appeared in Good Housekeeping, The Hartford Courant, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives on Boston's South Shore.
Her second book, Baker Towers (2005), was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship award for best book by a New England writer.
Her third novel, The Condition will be published by HarperCollins in July, 2008 traces the dissolution of a proper New England family when their only daughter is diagnosed with Turner's Syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that keeps her from going through puberty.

Interview Links
Chester College School Paper
BookBrowse.com
Eye On Books (audio interview)

Author's Official Website
Click here

Rushdie Wins Hyperbolic 'Best Ever' Award(But what happens when they hand out next year's?)

Via NPR:
Salman Rushdie is probably the Booker Prize's best-known winner. Now he is officially the best.Rushdie's 1981 novel "Midnight's Children" was named Thursday as the greatest-ever winner of Britain's most prestigious literary award. The book received more than a third of the 7,801 votes cast in a competition to mark the prize's 40th anniversary.

To continue this article, click here.

Book News, In Brief

Russia has banned a Hitler-themed history book because it contains quotes from der Fuhrer which are offensive to Russians and Jews. I guess they wanted a kinder, gentler genocidal madman.

Got cancer? The vultures at HCI are circling overhead, looking for cancer stories for an upcoming Chicken Soup for the Soul book. Note: They only want inspirational cancer stories. Sad ones, tragic ones, and ones that end in death simply do not sell. The submission deadline lifeline is August 31.

The 101 year old executor of Franz Kafka's estate has finally died, freeing up the author's until-now unseen private papers. Don't get me wrong, it's never nice when someone dies, but when you don't know that someone, and that someone has been selfishly sitting on a literary goldmine for the past forty years...well, I ain't crying, that's all I'm saying.

From WOOD TV: A Christian publisher Zondervan is facing a $60 million federal lawsuit filed by a man who claims he and other homosexuals have suffered based on what the suit claims is a misinterpretation of the Bible. Does anyone really think that this guy is going to win? In today's courts? The fact that they still make you swear in on a Bible leads me to believe that the case is doomed.

Disney Book News, In Brief

R.I.P. Thomas M. Disch, 68; prolific science-fiction writer and author of The Brave Little Toaster, the children's book that was later made by Disney into an animated film. For a longer, more fitting obituary, click here.

In a previous D.B.N. update, I mentioned the upcoming release of Jeff Kurtti and Bruce Gordon's long awaited book, Walt Disney's Legends of Imagineering and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Parks. Well, Didier Ghez has just posted an interview with Kurtti, and it's a good one.

Disney has released some new info about their upcoming comics venture, Kingdom Comics, at Wizard World Chicago. Here's a bit of it, via Adventures In A Strange Land: If you'll remember a month or so ago Disney announced that they were launching a comic book company called Kingdom Comics. Well, this was a panel to show that they are serious. They've hired Ahmet Zappa, and Christian Beranek to head it up and both were on hand to 'answer questions'. Unfortunately the company is just getting off the ground and they couldn't even announce a single title. All they said was that they intend to cull from the Disney library of live action properties throughout the ages, and they only intend to produce graphic novels, no monthly issues.

Disney corporate politics, via that bastion of truth, The New York Post: An ex-employee of Harvey and Bob Weinstein is writing an "explosive" book about their management of Miramax, based on files and tapes compiled over a period of 15 years, a source claims. The so-far-anonymous author claims, "The book, which is told from a deep insider's point of view, will detail the day-to-day manipulation of the Disney company by the Weinstein Bros." The author attached a seven-minute audio file in his letter to The Post, "just to prove to you this is not some kook writing you." The recording is of a Dec. 12, 1996, phone call between Harvey and Joe Roth, then president of Walt Disney Studios, in which the two complain about the $138 million severance deal that Mike Ovitz negotiated to leave Disney after 16 months. (Click here to hear the recording.)

Book News, In Brief

The New York City cottage where writer Edgar Allan Poe lived is slated for renovation and will be closed for a year -- something about a strange, heartbeat sound coming from the floorboards. Details can be found at the CBC.

Our best wishes go out to the owners, staff and patrons of fellow indie bookstore, Bunch of Grapes, over on Martha's Vineyard. This past 4th of July, a fire next door spread to the bookstore, seriously damaging it. The good news: Bunch of Grapes plans to rebuild.

We're in an election year, which means we're about to be inundated with a million different Best Of lists pertaining to every nuance of democracy. We already did our list months ago (Top 5 Election Books), but here's one from The Washington Post: Fightin' Words: Five Memorable Revolutionary Books.

Over at the venerable Guardian UK (it's where I steal an inordinate amount of my daily links from), writer Mark Hooper argues that sometimes the best way to bring a book to life is to first watch its film adaptation. (Methinks he's smitten by Beowulf's amber colored Angelina Jolie.) (Methinks me is, too.)

Cumming Coming, October 14th

Da details.