Book News, In Brief

Comedian, author George Carlin is dead at age 71. R.I.P.

A lock of Jane Austen's hair recently sold for £5,640. The buyer wishes to remain anonymous, probably cuz they're embarrassed about wearing a weave.

Ian McEwan said he despises militant Islamism for its homophobia and sup-par treatment of the hunnies. The newspapers caught wind of it, and this was the resulting headline: I Despise Islamism, Says Brit Award Winning Author. And they wonder why people prefer blogs.

Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gülen, has been voted the world's top intellectual in a poll to find the leading 100 thinkers. Gülen, the author of more than 60 books, won a landslide triumph after the survey - which is organized by the British magazine, Prospect, and Foreign Policy, a US publication. The top 10 thinkers were all Muslim.

Spike Lee Options Ronald Mallett's The Time Traveler: One Man's Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality

From CHUD.com:
Spike Lee's been in the news for the wrong reasons lately, but the Miracle at St. Anna trailer is interesting enough to help everyone move on. Now the announcement that Spike has optioned the book The Time Traveler: One Man's Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, by one of America's first black Ph.Ds in theoretical physics, might wipe the slate clean. While a memoir, not sci-fi, the book has certain fantastic leanings. Author Ronald Mallett's father died when he was ten, and young Ron soon decided he'd build a time machine to save his father. Following through became a lifelong obsession; he's still working on it (and funded on the project!) now.
For the rest of the story, as well as a link to an episode of This American Life featuring Mallett, click on over to the original CHUD article.

5 Travel Writers Pick Their Favorite 'City Films'

Rolf Potts (Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel), Heidi Julavits (co-editor of The Believer), Pico Iyer (Video Night in Kathmandu), Tony Wheeler (creator of the Lonely Planet travel guides), and Ayun Halliday (No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late) all weigh in.

Make sure you have your passports ready, then click here.

Book News, In Brief

First an author had to worry about maintaining a MySpace, then the filming of their online ad, and now the rights to their tie-in video game?! When does a writer find the time to sit and write?

Tired of using that 'eye crusties' line from Neil Strauss' The Game? The New York Observer has an article on how to pick up chicks using ARCs. (Sorry ladies. Y'all are still stuck taking your cues from Sex in the City.)

Tom Farley, author of the recently released The Chris Farley Show and brother of said book's subject, is touring the country, doing promotion. Check his Facebook for local appearances, and then channel Chris' ghost by falling face first into the signing table, smashing it to pieces.

At last, a little good news from the Tokyopop implosion: Tokyopop is giving back the rights to some OEL to its creators. Sure, this 'good news' only comes as a result of the 'bad news' we spoke about earlier, but it's still a damned fine thing for a publisher to do.

I haven't made a single red cent from ads or bribes since I started blogging this b*tch. It's been strictly a labor of love. But now I want to try and redeem my time spent online (in your service!) for a favor. Would one of our readers attending this Saturday's Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC please -- puh-lezze! -- hook me up with a copy of Jim Rugg's Afrodisiac mini comic? I promise I'll make it up to you with more pictures of Carla Bruni in wet, white outfits (consistently our biggest click-through) and updated links to free Death Note scans (a close second).

Sam Raimi To Adapt Lehane

From CHUD.com:
William Shakespeare? Who dat? If you want to be somebody these days, you've got to adapt Dennis Lehane. Since Clint Eastwood popularized his stuff with Mystic River, the author's material has become fodder for Scorsese and given Ben Affleck a bridge back to respectability.
Now Sam Raimi is eying one of his books. Columbia picked up the forthcoming novel The Given Day for Raimi to develop as a directorial project.
For a summary of The Given Day, finish CHUD's article here.

OMG! He's Totally Hot!!

Dash Shaw is this year's Craig Thompson, this year's Paul Pope, and maybe, just maybe, next year's Adrien Tomine. Not content to rest on his dreamboat good looks just yet, Shaw has released the year's most talked about autobiographical comic, Bottomless Belly Button. BBB is the story of a group of adult siblings coming together during the divorce of their parents. As naval gazingly meek and melodramatic as one would expect a book whose title has the words 'belly button' in it to be, Shaw's opus also possesses enough wit to keep the cringe factor to (nearly) nil. To wit, the book is available in two different covers: one of his mom, the other of his pop. He's forcing you to choose between them, too!
For a peak at random pages, click here.

Book News, In Brief

To Kill A Mockingbird has been voted The Greatest Novel of All Time. Fun fact about this book: Harper Lee and editor Tay Hoff worked together for three years, writing and rewriting TKAM. How long does the average writer/editor touch-up take today?

The New York Times published a piece yesterday analyzing Amazon.com's bullying power, and what it means for the future of the book industry. The Times describes the online monolith's newest method of dealing with rebellious publishers as "nuclear" -- as in, instant annihilation.

C is for Criminal! Via The Huffington Post: Bill Clinton, who entered Family Circle's 5th Presidential Bake-Off against Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama, appears to have stolen his recipe for oatmeal cookies from Betty Crocker. Click here to compare.

We've recently started dealing in used books at The Inkwell. The two things you learn real fast are that everybody has old Harlequin Romance novels, and that most of the other books you're offered are total crap. Not so with the Bethlehem Area Public Library in PA. At a recent book drive, an anonymous donor dropped off a first edition of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. Heck, we'd have given them a least a dollar for it.

(More) Bad News From Tokyopop

Considering last month's layoffs, it was only a matter of time before the cut-backs at America's #1 manga publisher started trickling down to the books themselves. This blog post from Steady Beat author Rivkah dishes the newest dirt:
Just got off the phone with my editor, and it looks like not-so-good news for Steady Beat. In fact, it looks like not-so-good news for anybody who's working with TP right now. I'm not sure how much I should say for fear of causing an outright panic with other creators, but essentially, nearly all of Tokyopop's future books will be going straight to web. This wasn't a case-by-case scenario. Neither I nor any other single creators were singled out. It looks like the whole line of non-licensed material will cease printing and be promoted online only.
Thanks to The Beat for the heads-up.

Book News, In Brief

Are the buying public lemmings, buzzards, or both? Tim Russert's books are #1 and #2 on Amazon.com.

Perhaps he's disappointed that George Bush is contemplating an autobiography. I mean, why else would former Bush biographer and conservative evangelical Stephen Mansfield announce that his next book will be a pro-Obama tome?

Hey, maybe Mansfield's book can be the next pick in The Progressive Book Club, launching today. The PBC is an insular online book club, and the perfect choice for those of you afraid of ideas unlike your own.

Does a similar fate await us all? Via Anime News Network: Miyagi Prefectural Police officials in northeastern Japan have announced on Monday that they discovered a man dead in his apartment underneath several hundred manga volumes and magazines. They are investigating the cause of death and whether the 37-year-old male company employee is another casualty of last week's earthquake in Miyagi.

Recommended Summer Reading

It's not often that the staff at Inkwell reads the same book; we have an unwritten rule that we should diversify our reading selections to cut a wider swath through the books released each season. Who gets to read what is determined by who is the swiftest at attacking the new ARCs (Advance Reading Copies).

So when two copies of The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press, $22.00) floated around the store, Kathleen and I both snared a copy without realizing the other had one. When we discovered that not only were we reading the same book, but that we both absolutely loved it, all that was left to do was to select it as our top pick for the summer. It hits bookshelves on July 29th, and we can't wait to start handselling it to our fellow avid booklovers.

Here's the basic plot:
January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of WW2, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island, boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters.

Both witty and moving, the novel is told entirely through letters sent between the characters. Mary Ann Shaffer has worked as a librarian and bookseller, and her love for books shines throughout the pages. The power of literature to transform lives is evident in this wonderful book. Don't miss it!

p.s. Thanks to Michael Kindness, our Random House rep, who handed the book to me and told me I would love it. He was so right! To see more perfect picks by our Random House reps, Michael & Ann, visit their blog/podcast, Books on the Nightstand, by clicking here.

Making Hamburg of Your Sacred Cows #32:Shel Silverstein Was A Porn Fan

There are few things that our staff agrees upon, but one of them is surely the joy derived from breaking the hearts of the pretentious, Woods Holier-than-thou types when you tell them that their beloved Shel Silverstein not only loved porn, but produced it as well. Yes, the old perv was employed by Playboy for a number of years, writing columns (later collected in the book, Around The World), drawing nudie cartoons, and enjoying the full perks package available to a 60's writer of said skin mag -- namely, hanging out at the Playboy Mansion, shagging the bunnies, and making skin soup in Hef's grotto. For a short while, Silverstein even called the place home!

For a complete list of Silverstein's contributions to Playboy, click here.

For a free ringtone of Shel's raunchy classic, Everybody's Got Some But Me, click here.

Here's a Booklist review of Silverstein's Around the World, written by Gordon Flagg:
Best known as a children's author but also a successful songwriter ("A Boy Named Sue") and playwright, Silverstein started out as a cartoonist. In the 1950s and 1960s, Playboy sent him around the world to draw a travel journal. His 23 dispatches hailed from such far-flung locales as Japan, Moscow, London, Paris, and Africa, as well as such closer-to-home precincts as Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury, White Sox training camp, and a nudist colony. Most of the cartoons' gags play against cultural stereotypes, with a befuddled Silverstein as the butt of the joke: in a gorgeously limned Swiss village, he complains, "I'll give them 15 more minutes and if nobody yodels, I'm going back to the hotel." Befitting their provenance, many depict Silverstein's efforts to score with the local damsels. They feature the same deceptively casual line work that makes his children's books so visually compelling, and since far too little of Silverstein's work for adults is currently available, this engaging document of the countries he visited and of its era is a welcome delight.

This post is dedicated to all of the Waldorf School kids. Have a great summer, gang! Now's your chance to socialize outside of your economic strata!

Disney Book News, In Brief

Who is Rocket Johnson? I'll let the official website answer that: Who is Rocket Johnson? is a 72 page graphic novel anthology being self-published by Walt Disney Animation Studio's Story Artists and Directors. It's an all-ages book in which every artist answers the question: "Who is Rocket Johnson?" It will be sold exclusively at booth 2302 in San Diego (http://www.comic-con.org/) and is a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Contributing artists include Steve Anderson, John Musker, Mike Gabriel, Glen Keane, Arthur Adams, and twenty more!

Former Disney animator Davy Liu will be releasing his second children's book, Fire Fish, on June 28th. The book "follows three little fish, Sarai, RaaOn and Sesom, who embark on a daring quest to find their missing parents." Hmn...sounds a bit like Finding Nemo, no?

Walt's People Volume 6 is now in stores. Didier Ghez' exhaustive series of interviews with the many writers, artists and office folk from the golden age of Disney just keeps on going. The newest installment includes chats with Ollie Johnston and Eric Larson, among others.

Attention UK readers! Disney and The Daily Mail have joined forces to provide readers of the D.M. with free copies of Disney's Wonderful World of Knowledge encyclopedias. The first volume went out with June 10th's copy, with 22 more volumes to follow.

Hyperion, the book arm of Disney's corporate Voltron, has announced their plans to publish the first two 'adult' novels by Gossip Girl author, Cecily Von Ziegesar. The first book, Cum Laude, is about a group of college freshmen. How 'adult'!

Tangible Proof That Oprah's Book Club Is Better Than Yours

The people have spoken airbrushed.

Book News, In Brief

Author Susan King (I'm the King of the Castle) blogs about the lies that lay beneath an author's book sale boasts. Now you'll have some ammo to sling at that pretentious and demanding author acting like an ass at their next in-store appearance.

Via The Tennessean.com:
'Bawdy' Bible Shows Good Book's Naughty Side
Examine Bible stories top to bottom - particularly the "bottoms" - and you will find a blue vein of sexual and scatological humor not-so-hidden in the verses, say two scholars of Hebrew Scriptures and an evangelical satire writer. Their new book, "The Uncensored Bible: The Bawdy and Naughty Bits of the Good Book," in stores this week, raises such questions as "Which "bone' was Eve made from?" Or whether, in the Book of Judges, a king's assassin escapes through a latrine in a tale laden with euphemisms for feces.

Chuck Norris jokes on the internet are as played out as complaining about prices at the gas pump. In light of this, I'll just stick to the facts: Norris has dropped his lawsuit against the kid who wrote 'the book of mythical facts' about him.

For smart, barbed comics reviews, head on over to The Factual Opinion. Writers Nina and Tucker Stone must have balls the size of Brian Micheal Bendis' word balloons, offering up such controversial true-isms as: "that's what (the newest issue of) American Splendor reminded me of: bad haikus" and, in regards to Lethem and Dalrymple's Omega The Unknown, "Nine issues in, and all that's been produced is something that's a valiant attempt to out-weird Steve Gerber and some great, downright fantastic work by Gary Panter. Somebody, somewhere, tell comics to stop trying to be cool. The fact that nobody reads the Bible in Williamsburg doesn't make reading the Bible in Williamsburg indy-rock."

The Comics Journal billed the following link as, "The Most Awesome Thing You'll See Today." Lo and behold -- the hyperbolic moniker actually fits! Click here for the awesomeness.

I know that if I try hard enough, I can find a way to blame Sex & The City.
Via Bookseller.com: More Women Reject Poet Laureate Post
Fleur Adcock and Ruth Padel, who have both been tipped for the role of poet laureate, have suggested that the post's responsibility of writing for the Queen was probably more trouble than it was worth, reports the Independent...Wendy Cope previously poured scorn on the post, saying that she "never wanted" to be laureate. "Personally I feel it is an archaic post and means nothing. It's simply not important," she said.

Recommended Viewing:J.K. Rowling's Harvard Commencement Speech

Click here to view.

Book News, In Brief

A new book titled When Good People Have Affairs claims that an affair could actually save your marriage. Note to readers: If you catch your mate clicking the previous link, you might want to consider couples counseling.

If you'd been busily writing a Hilary book, you might want to invest in some White Out. According to the AP, from now 'til the election, Obama books will be the public's preference. A wide variety of works about Senator are planned for the summer and fall -- everything from children's stories and photographs to attacks from both the left and the right.

A sign o' the times, care of The New York Times: A few years ago, when the housing market was white-hot, companies that publish how-to books were tripping over themselves to pump out titles about buying property and making money in the real estate business. Now that the bottom has fallen out of the housing market, the opposite is true: publishers are updating their backlist titles as well as rushing out newly acquired manuscripts to advise consumers who may have stumbled in the housing game.

And now the Top 10 Bestseller Lists (well, the links to them): HC Fiction, HC Nonfiction, Manga and E-book.

Book News, In Brief

HarperCollins seems to forget that they're not dealing with a Margaret Seltzer-style publishing wangsta here: Publisher sues Victoria Gotti over book advance. Um, this chick is fo' reals, yo. (Well, her husband is.) (Was.)

Hyperion today announced plans to publish the first adult novels by Cecily Von Ziegesar, New York Times bestselling author of the Gossip Girl series. I'll do the math for you: Hyperion is owned by Disney, who own ABC, who would love a Gossip Girl size hit show. (And no, "Gossip Girl size" is not a fat joke. Those girls are all anorexics, fer chrissakes.)

R.I.P. Jonathan Williams, unorthodox American poet, publisher, photographer - and disciple of Ezra Pound. For a fitting tribute, head over to the Guardian UK.

Book News, In Brief

Tikatok, an online children's book community, has announced that ten year old author Adora Svitak will join their new Children's Advisory Board. This is either a desperate attempt to grab headlines, or that Svitak chick is a helluva lot smarter than the ten year olds gnawing on the Bone books in our store.

On the other end of the 'Aw, isn't that cute?' spectrum, ninety one year old author Michael P. Verticchio is profiled in the Herald & Review. Verticchio is notable for his new book Family Love, and for the fact that he hadn't published anything until four years ago. I bet he hates kids like Adora Svitak.

Via The GuardianUK: Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, has become Penguin UK's fastest selling hardback fiction title ever, with 44,093 copies sold in the four days. Does this mean that we'll all be dressing up as super agents for the midnight release of Faulks' inevitable follow up? I'd finally perfected my Hermione drag act, and now I've gotta come up with a Ms. Moneypenny routine?! Sheesh.

Media Bistro asked LA Times editor Russ Stanton: How many years will it be until there is no print edition of the L.A. Times? Stanton replied: One hundred twenty-six [laughs]. But, you know, somebody, somewhere soon is going to throw in the towel on print. For us, I think that for now, our core base of readers are the baby boomers, and I think that we've got at least another 35-year run in print.
To read the whole interview, click here.

It's Hard Out There For A Pimp Pub.(and a distributor, bookstore, etc.)

Tokyopop revamps, laying off 39 and cutting the number of titles they published in half.

Borders Group Inc. says it is cutting nearly 275 corporate positions as part of a plan announced last week by the nation's second-largest bookseller to reduce annual expenses by $120 million.

EDU, the American distributor for the Usborne children’s line, had a 7% decline in sales to chain stores.

Publishers Services International, a distributor of games, fiction, and graphic fiction to the book and hobby trades, filed suit last Friday against Roaring Studios, otherwise known as Dabel Brothers Publishing, alleging breach of contract and demanding payment of moneys owed, expenses, and other relief.

And While We're At The Pity Party...


Here's Adrian Tomine's (Optic Nerve) cover for the new New Yorker. Sad, but true.

Book News, In Brief

Eff your stupid promo bookmarks. This guy's found a flashier way to hype his book. Via UPI.com: A businessman in Indonesia said he let about $10,700 fall to the ground from an airplane Sunday as a publicity stunt for his latest book about marketing. Tung Desem Waringin, 42, let the money fly over the Indonesian city of Serang, about 40 miles west of Jakarta, CNN reported Sunday. The money-drop was aimed at creating a buzz about Waringin's latest book Marketing Revolution.

You know the book industry is doing wrong by its readers when an author makes headlines simply for writing about "difficult, real issues." Click here to "keep it real" with author Marilyn Reynolds and The Pantagraph.com.

Ah, the Kindle. To paraphrase Ice Cube, it's the e-book you love to hate. Via The NYTimes: Excitement about the Kindle...worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

Nerd game! The Star Tribune tackles common writing mistakes, turning the article itself into one big quiz.

BookExpo America is this country's largest, most blogged about book trade show. Too bad it's not living up to its own hype. Via The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: It's too early to sum up the country's largest book trade show, wrapping up Sunday in sunny, cool Los Angeles, but the purely anecdotal report is: There's nothing to get excited about this year.