Book News, In Brief

According to The Prince George Citizen, the process of adapting a book to film is "a kind of demolition job." Click their link (above) to hear the demolition crews behind the recent adaptations of The Kite Runner, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Atonement discuss their destructive craft.

Via Salon.com: The Canadian government is cracking down on the hateful diatribes of right wing extremists. Sounds good, right? Wrong! The real issue here isn't your liberal guilt and NPR-ispired ideals. It's free-motherf**king-speech. "For those unable to think past the (well-deserved) animosity one has for the specific targets in question here, all one needs to do instead is imagine these proceedings directed at opinions and groups that one likes."

This weekend's papers were brimming with articles encouraging self-publishing. Read them here, be inspired, but please -- PUH-LEEZE -- do not then bring a box of your print-on-demand tomes round to our store, trying to unload them en masse. Truth be told, it's the rare self-published work that actually sells.
(Editor's note to you, our faithful reader/writer: This post was in no way referring to your book. We were -- of course -- talking about everyone else's. Your book is going to be great. A real success. Poorly edited, but totally profound. We promise.)

Book News, In Brief

Striking screenwriters have decided to try writing kiddie books. They claim it's cuz kids lit and movies are both a melding of words and images. I say it's cuz both are sparsely scripted and aimed primarily at drooling idiots.

Book sales are stagnant. I'm not talking about the numbers, though. I'm talking about the titles. This week's NYTimes bestseller list read like a Xerox of June 2007's: A Thousand Splendid Suns, I Am America, The Dangerous Book for Boys...how can this be? The ranking authors are even more tired tried and true: James Patterson, Sue Grafton, Dean Koontz. Zzzz...

Former New Yorker editor and Princess Diana biographer, Tina Brown, is writing a book about Bill Clinton. Something about a cigar...something about Talk magazine...see you next week!

Book News, In Brief

Don't give in to that post-Xmas suicide urge just yet -- 2008 has comics worth living for. The Savage Critic(s) list(s) 'em.

Via Reuters: Joel and Ethan Coen win the 20th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award for their film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country For Old Men. Who else thinks that The Nanny Diaries was robbed? (Cue: crickets chirping)

The Wagner Clan ain't nuthin' to f**k with. English biographer Jonathan Carr dishes the dirt on Germany's most famous musical family...and what dirt there is! One of them -- Wagner's granddaughter, Winifred -- used to call Hitler by a pet name, 'Wolf,' and was so smitten with Der Fuhrer that she attended Hitler Youth reunions until her death in 1980.

Free Comic Book Day Goes Worldwide (Well, Sort Of)

Via AFP: "China's ruling Communist Party will release an anti-graft comic book during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday to help officials avoid corruption. The pocket-size comic book, which includes caricatures depicting common forms of graft and bribery, will be distributed as a gift to 100,000 party members."

Recommended Viewing: Dennis Lehane Interview

Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Book News, In Brief

Publisher's Weekly lists the 15 Trends To Watch in 2008. E-books take up nine spots. Of the remaining six, three have to do with publishers' websites, two have to do with the pros & cons of Barnes & Noble's "sophisticated supply chain," and one hints strongly at the elimination of traveling sales reps. Cheery.

It's a bad time for literary fiction, and the librarians are to blame. From the GuardianUK: "(There has been) a shift in the priorities of libraries, which used to be a guaranteed haven for several thousand copies of hardbacks that take a bit of brain work, but which are now rapidly ceding shelf-space to Citizens Advice Bureau leaflets or DVDs." (Editor's note: The Inkwell unequivocally absolves all sexy librarians of any blame.)

Locus Magazine interviews fantasy/SF author Nnedi Okorafor (Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker) about a wide variety of topics, the most interesting to me being why science fiction hasn't made further inroads in Africa: "I guess people write what they know. From my experience with the Nigerians, most don't read stuff specially categorized as ‘fantastical.’ (...) Maybe this category doesn’t exist in Nigeria because it’s not needed. The fantastical is naturally a part of the Nigerian world already.”

Recommended ViewingAlan Moore - Monsters, Maniacs and Moore

Book News, In Brief

The reason Tom Wolfe left longtime publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux should have been obvious to anyone who'd ever read his work: money. Dude is obsessed with it. Apparently, he wanted a $5 million advance for his new book. Hmn...maybe if he revealed his secret recipe.

Princess Diana's controversy-courting biographer, Andrew Morton, has completed his unauthorized book on Tom Cruise. In it, Morton claims that Cruise is now the second in command of the Church of Scientology, and "suggests" that Cruise's daughter, Suri, was conceived using frozen sperm from the movement's dead founder L Ron Hubbard. Needless to say, the Church of Scientology is suing the author and his publisher, St Martin's Press, while fear of legal reprisal has already caused the cancellation of the book's publication in the UK.

BostonNow.com suggests that Barack Obama's reason for not having a plan to reduce foreign corporate control of the U.S. book publishing industry (and other U.S. media industries) is based -- at least partially -- around the $1.7 million two-book contract that he received from the Random House/Crown Publishers/Alfred Knopf subsidiary division of Bertelsmann AG. Does BostonNow.com have any proof? Of course not. But they're a blog, so they don't have to, right?

I'm Robbing The Believer to Feed You, My Faithless, Fickle Flock

Besides Don Diva, The Believer is the only magazine out there actively giving the toll free internet a run for my meager funds. Listed below are a few interviews with writers of varying styles and formats. Enjoy.

Lydia Davis, author of Almost No Memory and Break It Down, translator of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, winner of many of the major American writing awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship for fiction.

David Simon, creator/writer/producer of HBO's The Wire and author of the books Homicide and The Corner, is interviewed by Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and Slam.

T Cooper, author of Some of the Parts and Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes (and perhaps the one person in the literary world with whom I could stand to have a book club) is interviewed by Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury.

Book News, In Brief

Tom Wolfe has switched publishers for his new novel, Back to Blood. Unfortunately, he has yet to switch to a new topic. Little, Brown and Company will be releasing Wolfe's umpteenth examination of wealth and class later this year.

Via The Guardian UK: Authors duke it out over the one sentence paragraph.

My patriotic heart soars with the eagles -- Canada has slipped behind the USA in regards to their reading habits. That means we've got 'em beat on murders, rapes, violent crimes and reading. We're number one! We're number one! Woo-hoo!

Video interviews with comics writer Alan Moore about V for Vendetta, Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls.

Marvel Comics has angered hordes of dedicated Spider-man fans with the newest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. In it, the fictional webslinger makes a deal with the fictional devil to re-write/throw out large chunks of last 45 years of the book's fictional continuity. In other words, it's the company's way of admitting that a lot of those stories were crap.

Lastly, the most obvious literary award headline ever today.

Recommended Viewing: J.K. Rowling: A Year In The Life

Book News, In Brief

Robert Frost's Vermont home was trashed by drunken, under-aged party goers. Apparently, Frost's ghost lured the teens to his home via his/its MySpace page. Perv.

I love this: The mainstream press is dissing Laura Ingalls Wilder. I only wish I'd gotten there first.

While HarperCollins "rushes to publish a Bhutto-written book," Carl Rove signs a $1.5 million book deal. Re-reading that last sentence, I think I've got a great idea as to how some crazed, lone gunman could help Rove with his first week sales...

Zzz. J.K. Rowling hints at another Potter book. Well, it's more money for us, right?

For the Lazy & the Kids...

Neil Gaiman has posted a preview of the upcoming adaptation of his book, Coraline, directed by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas). Enjoy.

For the Druggies & the Lazy & the Kids...

While you're pretending to work today/watching your kids play with cardboard boxes instead of the new Wii you drove across the state to purchase for them, why not listen to Alice In Wonderland, as read by author Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother)?

Book News, In Brief

Tired of waiting months for your manuscript's inevitable rejection letter? Creative Byline wants to help! Writers upload their manuscripts for $19.00 and 'first readers'—readers trained to look for basic writing ability—review them. Writers who don't make the cut receive targeted feedback on how to improve the work. Writers who make the cut receive a list of editors who are a potential match for the work -- and then the waiting that they thought they'd avoided finally begins. (Link)

The best selling books so far this holiday season: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, and I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert.

Borders has launched an e-book program in conjunction with Sony, hoping to re-Kindle the interest of their prodigal patrons. (Link)

Book News, In Brief

The New York Times has a two page article on BookCrossing.com, a website promoting free, anonymous book trading in public places. 4.4 million books have been registered in the "catch and release" program thus far, with 600,000 readers registered.

Via Guardian UK: "Americans go for self-help, the French for philosophy and the British for trivia. Stuart Jeffries investigates the phenomenon of the Christmas bestseller and wonders what this year's big successes will be."

Have no fear, white trash, teenage baby-mommas: Britney Spears' mother may have canceled her proposed parenting book (something to do with her 'other daughter' -- aged 16 -- recently revealing her pregnancy), but Eminem's mom has announced an autobiographical accounting of her and her son's estranged-is-putting-it-mildly relationship.

Steam engine thought has everyone running stories about the dearth of reading among boys and men. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asks, Why don’t men do book clubs?, and then leaves it up to those folks frequenting the comments section to answer the question. The Minneapolis Star Tribune covers their school system's efforts to get boys interested in books besides Harry Potter and Star Wars spin-offs, posing their own Yoda-like query: Boys and books: How do you get them together? The Asheville Citizen Times does more than just ask broad questions. They describe a local librarian's semi-controversial attempt to refocus boys on books by separating the sexes into different reading groups designed to better deal with issues specific to each gender. My solution: slip some short fiction into Maxim Magazine.

Crazy Alert!

Keifer Bonvillain claimed to have hours of taped interviews proving that Oprah is not what she seems, and wanted to write a book about it. When no publisher would risk incurring her wrath, Bonvillain went the self-published route. While I have no plans to order the book myself (the website's shoddy design and the author's use of a comic book-worthy nom de plume do little to instill confidence in this credit card holder), the website's worth a look, if for no other reason than the loony chapter descriptions.

Here's a few:

Chapter 1: A Chance Encounter
The author is contacted by Harpo employee.

Chapter 2: Oprah's Attorney Called and He's Scared!
Author shares transcribed tapes of his conversation with Oprah’s attorneys.

Chapter 4: Did He Say Extortion?
The day of author’s arrest. (Includes never before released legal documents surrounding author’s arrest and the seizing of his property.)

Chapter 5: I’m the Infamous Oprah Extortionist
Author discusses world-wide media coverage of his arrest. (Includes documents showing how FBI kept author’s car for a month.)

Chapter 10: Lord I Need You
Author seeks spiritual guidance.

Chapter 16: Mystique around Oprah’s Sexual Preferences
The Other Woman.

Chapter 17: A Mutually Beneficial Subterfuge
Author discusses Oprah’s relationship with Stedman Graham.

Chapter 24: Birds of a Feather
The author discusses shocking statistics and uncovers a dark bond between Oprah and Obama. What you should know before you cast your presidential vote.

(Editor's note: I'd almost dismissed it as tabloid trash until I read the description of Chapter 10. Now I'm a believer!)

Big News (to me!)

DC Comics and Darwyn Cooke have announced a follow-up to DC: The New Frontier, titled Justice League: The New Frontier Special. The one-shot comic will feature a "lost chapter" detailing a Superman vs. Batman battle (alluded to in the original), as well as shorter stories about Wonder Woman, the Black Canary, and Robin, the Boy Wonder. Cooke is handling the art and writing for the S vs. B story, and is writing the scripts for the rest. Release is slated for March 2008.

(For Inkwell's review of DC: The New Frontier Absolute Edition, click here.)

Book News, In Brief

One of my All Time Top 10 cartoonists, Joe Sacco (Palestine, Notes from a Defeatist), gets grilled over at The Comics Reporter. No jokes, jabs or jibes here. I love dude.

Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt has written what can most charitably be described as Christmas fanfic...using his own critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize winning, best selling characters. To hear McCourt try and make a case for Angela and the Baby Jesus, head on over to Simon & Schuster's podcast page, 12/13/07.

In ever-so-slightly-related news, fanfic has a legal defense team! Via Boingboing: "The Organization for Transformative Works has just launched. It's a fascinating new proto-nonprofit determined to defend media fandom from the excesses of copyright and to help fanfic writers and vidders maintain control of their remixed works. The word "transformative" looks like they're throwing down the gauntlet in copyright battles, insisting that fic is fair use as a transformative work." Yes, soon you will be able to write and release all of the Harry/Ron romance scenarios your devious mind can conjure, but that unofficial lexicon you've been laboring away at will still be off limits.

Millionaire Mystery Buyer Unmasked, Revealed To Be Faceless Corporation

By now, everyone's heard that J.K. Rowling's handwritten collection of Potterworld short stories sold in an auction on 12/13 for nearly $4 million. What wasn't being so heavily hyped was the identity of the mystery buyer -- Amazon.com. According to Thaindian News, "Amazon has plans to publish reviews of the books content on its official website www.amazon.co.uk/beedlebard. The website will also facilitate an online discussion of Harry Potter fans." This, in conjunction with Rowling's court ordered injunction against the self-published Potter Lexicon, is straight killing J.K.'s street cred, fer reals.

Update:

Amazon.com has officially announced their purchase. Amateur photos, unrestrained hyperbole and brief, gushing reviews can be found here.