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Harry Potter knockoffs abound on the Chinese market, with titles like “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”

Laura Albert, the fiction writer known as JT LeRoy, was found by a jury last month to have engaged in fraud by signing her nom de plume to a movie contract for her acclaimed first novel, “Sarah.”

The new musical “Bookends” came about when the woman who took Sidney Poitier home for dinner met the rare-book dealers who exposed Louisa May Alcott’s dark secret.

Let’s see how much he remembers: the guitarist Keith Richards is writing an autobiography to be published in the fall of 2010.

It wasn’t until Victoria Beckham was photographed carrying a copy of “Skinny Bitch” in May that the book started climbing the best-seller charts.

Christine Kenneally’s lucid survey of the expanding field of language evolution is dedicated to solving what she calls “the hardest problem in science today.”

Norma Gabler became the public face of a crusade with her husband to rid schoolbooks of content they considered antifamily, anti-American and anti-God.

Legendary publisher and editor Nan Talese, who is the Senior Vice President of Doubleday and the Publisher and Editorial Director of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Books, describes the behind the scenes drama that led up to Oprah Winfrey's infamous program in which she blasted James Frey for lying in his book, A Million Little Pieces. Nan says she was misled about the nature of the program that day and says how appalled she was at Oprah's behavior.

We understand how Nan feels, certainly. But we really think Oprah's ire was aimed at James Frey -- Frey publicly humiliated Oprah by claiming his memoir was all true. He sold millions of copies because of Oprah's endorsement and this was payback. But it was not right that Nan was essentially tricked into being on the show that day. Nan, who has a reputation for excellence, did no wrong and didn't deserve that. She handled herself quite well that day, though.



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On 17 February 2003, a 39-year-old Egyptian man was walking down a quiet street in suburban Milan on his way to daily prayers. His real name was Osama Nasr, but he was known as Abu Omar. He was a cleric and political militant, an opponent of the Mubarak regime, and had refugee status in Italy (which is very hard to get). A man in police uniform came up to him and asked in Italian to see his documents. As he reached for his passport, Omar was bundled into a white van and driven away at high speed.

During 2005, while Nigel Cliff was writing his wonderful book about the Astor Place riot, I too visited a couple of the archives he consulted, namely the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the New York Historical Society. Long fascinated by the events of 10 May 1849, I couldn't leave Manhattan without making a pilgrimage to Astor Place. But I could find no memorial to the 26 people killed in one of New York's bloodiest episodes; nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard.

In a James Bond film, viewer credulity gets its toughest workout with the hero's tour of, and subsequent escape from, the villain's lair. This power-crazed evil genius, this smug gentleman in a tightly tailored suit posing as a bold entrepreneur: how was he able to construct a paramilitary base over a dozen square miles in the middle of, say, the United States, without its raising an eyebrow among the local constabulary? How did he get the zeppelin hangar past the county planning board? Such vast amounts of concrete. Such tunnels, such golf-carts, such fleets of helicopters armed with machine-guns. Such tours of firing ranges where hired muscle in beige boiler suits incinerates cardboard targets with grenades and automatic weapons. 'What do you think of our little playground, Mr Bond?'

To Kill a Mockingbird (Modern Classics) by Harper Lee, a review from The Atlantic Monthly by Phoebe Adams.

• Sunday Book Review cover: Samantha Power's review essay on the "war on terror" recommends, among other nooks that "begin to define a new approach to counterterrorism," The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, "The fundamental premise of the manual is that the key to successful counterinsurgency is protecting civilians"; and Containment by Ian Shapiro, "'The idea behind containment,' Shapiro writes, 'is to refuse to be bullied, while at the same time declining to become a bully.' ... Although it is tempting to feel overwhelmed by the diversity of the threats aligned against the United States, Shapiro says that very diversity presents us with opportunities, since it 'creates tensions among our adversaries’ agendas, as well as openings for competition among them.'"
• The Maytrees by Annie Dillard: "The good news is that in 'The Maytrees,' despite the big words and the name-dropping, despite remnants of what Welty called the 'receptivity so high-strung and high-minded' on display in 'Pilgrim,' there is also good old straight narrative and prose that is often, yes, breathtakingly illuminative."
• The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks: "'The Traveler' packed such a wallop that this all seemed to make perfect sense, in a 'Terminator'-meets-'Matrix' kind of way.... 'The Dark River,' like 'The Traveler,' ends with an effective cliffhanger and the promise of a continuing battle between good and evil. With any luck Mr. Twelve Hawks, whose blunt fervor remains undiminished, will get himself off autopilot and rejoin this fight with renewed vigor."
• The Invisible Cure by Helen Epstein: "After five years in Washington covering the politics of AIDS and three years in Africa writing about the lives of those infected and affected, in truth, I have little patience for books on AIDS in Africa. With few exceptions, they tend to be too self-important, too polemical, too grim or too at odds with my experiences in the field. Epstein, in contrast, teaches me things I didn't know."

• Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen: "These days, though, big-think economic theories feel a little passé.... We may have been Keynesians once, but times change. We are all Freakonomists now."

• The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva: "In the rush and bustle of a thriller, we barely notice the brutalization of Gabriel Allon. In some dark recess of our liberal souls, we may secretly approve of his cruelty, even as we publicly deplore the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Popular fiction like 'The Secret Servant,' by allowing heroic figures to express our common fears, rationalizes and justifies them -- makes them OK to act upon when someone in authority asks us to."

• Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin: "I read Michael Tolliver Lives without benefit of fresh referral to the earlier books. It's been years and years since last I looked at them, and many of their particulars have been gnawed into nothingness by those great predators, time and liquor; even so, I settled in to these new paragraphs with instant, familiar pleasure - the experience of picking up a conversation with a long-lost friend in just the place you last left off."

• In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak: "In Europe combines rich, at times thrilling, storytelling with arresting insights, even when Mak takes off down the most well-worn paths. The prose, in a fine translation by Sam Garrett, sparkles. In Europe is a stunning pointillist history of the continent's twentieth century. But at its core, it is a work of history that is sceptical about the possibility of writing history at all."

• The Assistant by Robert Walser: "It's only too bad that, for want of such a translation, Virginia Woolf never learned that the desire she expressed in her 1919 essay "Modern Fiction" for a more impressionistic and less narrowly empirical modern novel, a novel of floating sensibility rather than fixed characters, had been, to such a remarkable degree, anticipated a dozen years earlier by a Swiss writer living in Berlin."

Neal Thompson has written an account of the dispersal of a high school football team from New Orleans after Katrina.

Maureen McHugh says that SF you're holding in your hands might not be SF.

In which I review a whole bunch of authors with only two-word names.

In which I, mouth-frothing, praise Emma Bull's fantastic Territory.

Cory Doctorow on the Progressive Apocalypse.

Pat's Fantasy Hot Pants posts an interview with hotter-than-a-skillet SF author Peter F. Hamilton.

Matt Cheney's amazing review of Spaceman Blues, forthcoming work of near genius.

SF Site on that smell you've been smelling...

ReaderCon panelists fire off a canon chock-full of slipstream gunpowder.

SFzilla versus Mainstreamzilla!

Israelizilla versus Chabonzilla!

Westfahlzilla versus Sunshine, er, -zilla...

Andrew "Patch" Wheeler with a sneak peek at Gene Wolfe's new pirate novel.

And, finally, because there aren't enough books on or about the Hairy Putter books, J.K. Rowling has decided to "release the encyclopedias!"

--Jeff

Bestselling author Karin Slaughter and Oni Press are forming a joint comic imprint called Slaughterhouse Graphic Novels. The imprint, which is the first of its kind, will feature a line of original comic books and graphic novels written by established prose authors. Karin will pen the first release, The Recidivists, a graphic novel that will debut in April, 2009. From the official release:

In the tradition of science fiction with a social conscience as established by works like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's 1984, The Recidivistspeers into the society of tomorrow and warns us of the future we're building today. In this engaging and thoughtful collection of three overlapping narratives, Slaughter's crafting a graphic novel unlike anything the comic book industry has seen before, setting the stage for other prose writers to take the plunge into comics writing.

"This really is an area that we were one of the first publishers to focus on," explained OniPress publisher Joe Nozemack. "The last time we unleashed a novelist of this caliber on the comic book world, it was Greg Rucka (Patriot Acts, Whiteout). We've long wanted to build on that fine pedigree. Slaughter's enthusiasm for the medium melded perfectly with her skills as a writer and made this a project we were passionate to publish. The more we talked about the project, the more we all realized that this could be the first step in a newline to give established prose writers an outlet to break into the medium and to expand the potential for the types of stories they could do." Slaughter says.

"Graphic novels let you take risks that just wouldn't fly in the conventional book form. Visual story telling is at once immediate and subversive. I am thrilled to be partnering with Joe Nozemack and Oni Press, whose award-winning vision and success have already made them the preeminent graphic publishing house in the business." Slaughterhouse Graphic Novels will feature a wide-array of characters and genres, incorporating the diverse range of material which has consistently defined the identity of Oni Press. From science fiction to crime noir to humor-the only limitations on Slaughterhouse are that of the creator's imagination.

It sounds like an interesting venture.

Posted in Comics

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"Compassionate misanthrope" for President: At face-value, this really isn't a great campaign slogan, but it's an earnest question posed by a younger Senator Clinton that perhaps gets right at the heart of what makes this contentious candidate tick. [via The New York Times]

The only upside to a long commute...is the undivided time to sink your teeth into a book. I sympathize with The Guardian's MJ Iles on this point: 20 minutes isn't long enough (for me, anyway, a slow-ish reader) to get lost in a book. I'm not sure there is a perfect book to get you from point A to B, but it's fun to conjecture...and spy on what other people are reading. The last week has been pretty predictable: HP7 is ubiquitous!

A win for the home team. Our own Tom Nissley's Significant Seven pick for April--to wit, "a gleefully anachronistic and deeply scatological tale"--gets picked up by the LitBlog Co-op for their Summer 2007 read. --Anne

Paperback books of particular interest.

Recently reviewed books of particular interest.

Staton Rabin, author of “The Curse of the Romanovs,” recalls her grandmother’s tales of hiding under the bed when the Cossacks invaded her house.

Mary Carroll Moore — a writer, painter and singer — says her triple vision is focused on common themes.

Robert Ludlum died six years ago, but that has done nothing to slow the release of books published under the name of the actor-turned-novelist.