Last night in New York City's Times Square, hundreds of fans watched TNT's outdoor premiere screening of the first episode of the new Rizzoli & Isles, starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander and based on the novels by Tess Gerritsen, published by Ballantine. Here Gerritsen celebrates her Broadway debut.

 

 

 

 

Jon Thurber is the new book review editor for the Los Angeles Times, taking over the position previously held by David Ulin, who was recently named book critic. For the past year, Thurber worked as managing editor, print. Prior to that, he spent 11 years as obituary editor.

In a memo to the newsroom, editor Russ Stanton wrote that Thurber "will lead a team of editors and writers who will produce a broader range of reviews, features and trend stories for the daily and Sunday Calendar sections and A1. He also will oversee the lively landing page online as well as the prize-winning Jacket Copy blog."

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Headlines about the book trade using the phrase "turn the page" may be ubiquitous, but they're usually not literal. TechCrunch reported, however, that "Apple’s iBooks iPad application has a page turning feature that replicates the curling of a page when you flip pages in a book. But Microsoft is claiming that it invented this feature in a patent application, according to a GoRumors report."

The 2009 patent application for Virtual Page Turn "appears to have been filed with Microsoft’s Courier touch-based tablet in mind. But unfortunately, that project was tabled  a few months ago," TechCrunch wrote, noting "it seems that the patent has not actually been awarded to the company yet. But the tablet is dead, so it’s unclear what the benefit would be to Microsoft at this point (besides maybe engaging in a bit of legal patent fun with Apple)."

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Today at noon, Eagle Harbor Book Co., Bainbridge Island, Wash., is hosting a Peace Corps information session, at which Anne Fraser will talk about her Peace Corps service in El Salvador. She'll also answer questions and give tips about the application process for becoming a volunteer.

Eagle Harbor's Paul Hanson noted that this is the first time the store has hosted such an event. "They approached us and asked if we would," he continued. "We would have wanted to just on principle, but we're especially interested since the daughter of our Alison, our children's book buyer, recently completed her Peace Corps Volunteer service in Burkina Fasa AND one of our former employees is currently serving in Morocco."

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Kelly Amabile, who has served as event coordinator at WORD, Brooklyn, N.Y., since March 2009, will continue to manage events until Jenn Northington takes on the role full-time in September. She looks forward to helping WORD with events scheduled for the Brooklyn Book Festival in her final weeks on the job. She also continues to work for the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, is working towards her MLIS at Queens College and is doing an internship at Poets House this summer helping catalogue its multimedia collection.

Although she is shifting focus from bookselling to librarianship, there seems to be no escaping books for Amabile. She said she has deep gratitude to "all the wonderful colleagues I've met, worked with and learned from during the past three years as an indie bookseller in New York City."

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Australian bookseller Therese Holland of McLeods Books, Nunawading, wrote about "The Glamorous Life of a Used Book Dealer" on The Bookshop Blog, where she observed: "Sometimes, just for a fleeting moment I hanker for the good old nine to five. Why? Because when you sell on line your work day is never over.... Sometimes I think if only the B&M was turning over enough stock I could get rid of online and other times I think if only online was turning over enough stock I could get rid of the B&M but for now I think I am stuck with the Internet Ball and Chain."

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"It is September in Sachs Harbour, northern Canada. In the cold and desolate landscape, Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander are about to begin a new adventure," the Associated Press (via Yahoo News) wrote in a piece investigating the mystery surrounding the fourth book of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series that "was left unfinished on the author's laptop when he died suddenly in 2004 at age 50."

The mysterious manuscript is part of a legal battle being waged over Larsson's estate between the late author's family and his longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, "who has refused to talk about it and won't reveal the whereabouts of the last installment in the series," the AP reported.

"The question about the fourth manuscript is entirely hypothetical," said Eva Gedin, head of publishing at Norstedts. "We have never studied this manuscript and therefore don't know if it exists, how much has been written and if so what shape the manuscript is in."

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The AP also reported that dedicated Stieg Larsson fans "are getting lost in the Swedish countryside, searching for the quaint town of Hedestad featured in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The problem is, it doesn't exist. But international readers of Larsson's best-selling Millennium crime trilogy could be excused for thinking otherwise, because most locations in the books are authentic." Those settings in and around Stockholm have now become destination spots for the international travelers, whether in tour groups or venturing out on their own.

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In an article about the revival of interest in Hans Fallada's work that has been spurred by Melville House's publication of Every Man Dies Alone, the Chicago Tribune observed: "To anyone who's depressed about the state of literary culture these days, Dennis Johnson would like to offer a three-word pep talk: Go to Chicago. It was during a recent visit that Johnson, founder of the dynamic, eclectic and increasingly important Brooklyn-based publishing company Melville House, took a quick spin through the city's bookstores, from chains such as Borders to independents such as Quimby's, Unabridged, Book Cellar, Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books. At the latter, Johnson said, he watched an employee persuade a customer to take a chance on a book by Hans Fallada, of whom the customer had never heard."

"The guy was asking for Alan Furst's latest novel," Johnson recalled, "and I watched the bookseller hand-sell Every Man Dies Alone.... There are few cities in the United States with an independent bookstore scene to rival Chicago's. Those places and the people in 'em just remind me of what it's all about."

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Warren Buffet: handseller. The Telegraph reported that an "obscure book about the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s has become cult reading among leading financiers, after a tip from billionaire investor Warren Buffett."

Published in 1975, When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson "became the talk of right-wing blogs and economics websites, with copies changing hands for up to £1,600 (US$2,402). Old Street Publishing, a small British publisher, has rushed out a new edition to meet demand," the Telegraph noted.

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"Excuse me, ladies and gentleman," Randy Kearse calls out, but anyone who has ridden on the New York City subway system and thinks they know what's coming next may be in for a surprise. "I am not begging, borrowing or asking for your food. I don't represent the homeless, I'm not selling candy or selling bootleg DVDs... I write books."

The New York Times profiled Kearse, who "said he had sold some 14,000 copies of his self-published books in the last three years, at $10 each, mostly through hand-to-hand sales."

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"Is it sweet to tweet or is Twitter twaddle?" asked the Bookseller.com in its attempt to discover if "Twitter followers mean book sales and have publishers got Twitter right."

Kate Fitzpatrick, HarperCollins U.K. digital marketing manager, observed that publishers "are grasping it but there are also some examples of 'we’ve ticked the digital boxes.' It’s organic, but it needs a structure behind it."

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GalleyCat showcased collectible treats for library fans that are featured on the website Etsy, including Library Card Stock Necklace, Foaming Tentacular Spectacular Library Cards and Pockets and the Boston Readers Boston Readers Bookish Paperweight.

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Dr. Abraham Verghese, bestselling author and a professor of medicine at Stanford University, prescribed his five favorite books on doctors' lives for the Wall Street Journal. His choices: The Life of Sir William Osler by Harvey Cushing, Mortal Lessons by Richard Selzer, The Puzzle People by Thomas Starzl, Adventures in Two Worlds by A.J. Cronin and Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin's Disease by Charlotte Jacobs.

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Tweet of the day:

 

Five of America's bestselling thriller writers will travel to the Persian Gulf for a week-long USO tour. As part of Operation Thriller, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Doug Preston, James Rollins and Andy Harp will visit U.S. troops to "talk fiction, inspire, spread cheer and, most importantly, show their heartfelt gratitude," according to organizers.

The authors were at the International Thriller Writers annual Thrillerfest in New York City last weekend for the announcement of the tour. Operation Thriller will begin with a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and National Naval Medical Center in Washington, D.C., after which the authors fly to the Persian Gulf for stops at multiple posts where they will sign autographs, pose for photos and distribute advance copies of their upcoming novels. Due to security reasons, the specific countries and tour dates cannot be released at this time.

 

Comic book legend Harvey Pekar, who "chronicled his life and times in the acclaimed autobiographical comic book series, American Splendor, portraying himself as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive 'flunky file clerk' engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety," died yesterday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. He was 70.

"Among cartoonists and comics fans, the encomiums poured forth Monday at the news of Pekar's passing," the Washington Post observed, noting that "Neil Gaiman tweeted: 'A sad day for comics.' And Matt Fraction wrote on Twitter: 'So harvey pekar gets to the gates of heaven and goes, 'man, look at this line.' "

In the same piece, the Post featured a remembrance by Mike Rhode, who edited Harvey Pekar: Conversations: "Harvey's brains and willpower let him rise from his blue-collar beginnings, and eventually overcome his psychological fears to become a true part of American culture. I would think that he's the only Social Security file clerk to also be a jazz critic, book reviewer for the Washington Post, and comic book writer and have a major motion picture made about his life.... Harvey's work will live on after him, and he'll be taught in college courses for his groundbreaking autobiographical comix, and we're all richer for his sharing his experiences with us."

For Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog, Ken Tucker wrote that Pekar "probably became as well known as a cult figure can be without becoming a star--a term for which Pekar had no use in his value system. It’s sad that he’s dead; what’s wonderful is that there is a great mass of uncollected prose (all of his reviews for publications such as Down Beat and The Austin Chronicle) that should find a future publisher. And there’ll always be American Splendor, in which Pekar explained to an audience more used to reading about caped crusaders than janitors that it was often the the file clerks, the grocery-store baggers, and the janitors of the world who had more to tell us about our lives, and they spoke through Harvey Pekar."

 

Today on NPR's Diane Rehm Show: Ayelet Waldman, author of Red Hook Road (Doubleday, $25.95, 9780385517867/0385517866).

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Tomorrow on the View: Laura Ingraham, author of The Obama Diaries (Threshold Editions, $25, 9781439197516/1439197512). She will also appear tomorrow on Fox and Friends and Imus in the Morning.

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Tomorrow night on the Tonight Show: Drew Brees, author of Coming Back Stronger: Unleashing the Hidden Power of Adversity (Tyndale House, $26.99, 9781414339436/1414339437).

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Tomorrow night on a repeat of the Colbert Report: John Waters, author of Role Models (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 9780374251475/0374251479).

 

TV movie producer Larry A. Thompson has acquired the rights to Kitty Kelley's controversial Oprah: A Biography, and "plans to turn the book into a TV movie or a miniseries to air in September 2011, coinciding with Winfrey's sign-off from her syndicated daytime talk show after 25 years. He is close to signing a writer for the adaptation and is already shopping the project to TV networks," according to Deadline.com.

"Oprah Winfrey is a very powerful woman, and that's also something that will make our movie great," Thompson said, adding that he is leaning toward casting an unknown actress in the role because Oprah "is one of the most famous faces on the planet, and if you have an actress people know, it may make it more difficult to get into the character as the face may block the icon." The movie, like the biography, is being made without Winfrey's participation.

 

Tom Collins (Kings) will produce and direct a film adaptation of Seamus Deane's novel Reading in the Dark, Variety reported, adding that the script has already been written by Ronan Bennett (Public Enemies), but hasn't been cast yet.

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Cinema Libre (Uncovered: The War on Iraq), which specializes in producing and distributing social issue films, is developing a feature version of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, a book first published in 2004 that has sold a million copies in 30 languages, Variety reported.

Phillipe Diaz, chairman of Cinema Libre and the film's producer, said, "John's book reads like a thriller but it is the first book to explain how the multi-national corporations played a shell-game to indebt third-world countries."

 

During his Thrillerfest lecture, author Lorenzo Carcaterra "chose the 10 best thriller films made from books, the 10 worst, and the 10 he most wants to see get made," Deadline.com reported.

Speaking about author input in the process, Carcaterra--whose novel Sleepers was directed by Barry Levinson--said, "Authors like Elmore [Leonard] realize it's unseemly to complain, when you consider how much we get paid. When Sydney Pollack mentioned to John Grisham he hoped they hadn't messed up The Firm, Grisham said, 'if you did, you'll never hear it from me.' Anne Rice took out full page ads about the casting of Interview with the Vampire, until maybe somebody explained her backend definition, and suddenly she was ecstatic. Adapting books into movies is a hard job that becomes impossible with an author standing over your shoulder who doesn't understand the process. Authors get paid very well, and so you have to take the money and shut up."

 

Recipients of this year's International Thriller Writers Thriller Awards were named during Thrillerfest in New York City over the weekend. The winners are:

Best Hard Cover Novel: The Neighbor by Lisa Gardner
Best Paperback Original Novel: The Coldest Mile by Tom Piccirilli
Best First Novel: Running from the Devil by Jamie Freveletti
Best Short Story: A Stab in the Heart by Twist Phelan
ThrillerMaster: Ken Follett, in recognition of his legendary career and outstanding contributions to the thriller genre
True Thriller Award: Mark Bowden
Silver Bullet Award: Linda Fairstein
Silver Bullet Corporate Award: US Airways

 

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, July 20:

Witness to America: A Documentary History of the United States from the Revolution to Today by Douglas Brinkley (Harper, $29.99, 9780061990281/0061990280) is an anthology of first-hand accounts of important events in American history.

The Dorm Room Diet: The 10-Step Program for Creating a Healthy Lifestyle Plan That Really Works by Daphne Oz and foreword by Mehmet Oz (Newmarket, $16.95, 9781557049155/1557049157) outlines a student-friendly diet for maintaining a healthy weight in college.


Now in paperback:

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, $16.99, 9780060852580/0060852585).

You Betcha!: The Witless Wisdom of Sarah Palin by Leland Gregory (Andrews McMeel, $9.99, 9780740797569/0740797565).

 

When Cynthia Christensen, owner of Book Stop, Hood River, Ore., had pneumonia and laryngitis, her original solution for working at the store was to put up a sign that said, "I have laryngitis and can't talk at all. However, I know several useful hand gestures. Not all of them are rude." But this didn't work because people asked so many open-ended questions. Her doctor then forbade her to go to work until her voice returned.

So for two weeks, her husband, Charlie, who usually works in an ER, stepped in and replaced her in the store. He kept notes in a journal of interactions with customers (and non-customers!), which came to form what he calls "a simultaneous rant and ode to the trade." Cynthia noted that Charlie now has "a much greater appreciation for what I do, and belligerent drunks in his ER don't annoy him as much as they did before."

Among the conversations:

"I'm just browsing."

"I'm just killing time."

"Do you have a restroom? My son needs to poop."

"Do you have this used?" (Holds up a book just released in paperback that day.) "It was just released today." "But you're a used bookstore." "Sorry, they haven't figured out how to print them used."

"Where is the free parking?"

"Can I get change for the meter?"

"What do you sell here?"

"Do you have any free maps?"

"Can I use this water bowl over here for my dog?"

"Is this all you have for a Christian section? God!"

"I need a Band-Aid."

"Can my kids stay here while I'm eating next door?"

"How do I know the price?"

"Is there a restroom here?" (Many, many, many more times today.)

"Do you have ________?" (Insert obscure, possibly fake book title to look cool in front of friends with no chance of having actually to spend any money.)

"Can I make you a deal on this book?"

"Have you seen my wife?"

"Do you have maps?" (Looks at map, writes directions, incorrectly folds map, leaves it on the sofa.)

"Where is your Red Tail Hawk section? You know, the bird."

"Where am I?"

"Can I bring my dog in your store?"

"Do you sell coffee?"

"Is this a library?"

"Was Abraham Lincoln really a vampire hunter?"

"Do you have Under the Dome in softcover?"

"Is my mommy there? I miss talking to her." (Our 22-year-old daughter, Laura.)

"How come this town has three bookstores?"

"I can get it cheaper on Amazon."

"Can you describe the lay of the land around here?"

"Will my car get towed if I leave it in front of your store all day?"

"I'm looking for a book that has the word 'free' in the title."

"Mom, I have to poop!"

"Do you have a chicken section? Goats?"

"Have you seen my children?"

"Do you carry newspapers?" (I show him the Hood River News.) "That's not a newspaper."

"Do you have any way so that I don't have to pay these meters?"

"There's a hair on this sofa."

"Mom, can I have this Clifford book?" "No, Clifford gets on my nerves."

"Are all these books donated to you, so I can just take one?"

"Do you buy books?" "No, but we'll take certain books in for store credit." "So you buy books?" "No. We just trade for store credit." "I just want money."

"If I bring in some books, can you tell me what they're worth so I can sell them on eBay?"

"I never knew there was a library here." "There is, but it's on the next street over." "What is this?" "It's a bookstore." "Oh, I don't read."

"Can you watch my children while I eat at the bagel shop?"

"Are these books for sale or do you just collect them?"

"Dad, look a bookstore! Let's take a look." "Why? It's just books." "Come on, it will just take a minute." "No, reading is stupid."

"Have you read all these books? When do you watch TV?"

"Are you hiring?" "No." "I like books." "So do I." "I promise not to get in the way. I could just read or something."

"Are you hiring?" "No." "Good! Can I use your company's name?" "Why?" "I have to tell the Unemployment Department I can't find a job."

"Do you have women in here?"

"I need quarters for your stupid parking machines."

"Can I buy a stick of your gum?" (Seeing my personal pack behind the counter)? "No, that's not for sale. But you can buy a book." "No, I hate books."