"These two crazy kids are going to work it out. Even if she's a human and he's a demon, those two kids are meant to be together."--Kate Duffy's formula for a satisfying romance novel as recounted by Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books in an obituary in today's New York Times.

"Why do they always name schools after politicians and movie stars? Why don’t they name a school after a teacher?" the late Frank McCourt often asked. Now his wish may come true. New York magazine reported Mayor Michael Bloomberg "is expected to soon announce the creation of the Frank McCourt High School of Writing, Journalism and Literature, an application-only high school to open next fall on West 84th Street."

Shortly before his death, McCourt was told that the school project might happen. According to Tom Allon, a former student, now a teacher, "I said, 'It’s looking very good, Frank, and there's a lot of good will about it.' He said, 'What an honor. What a great thing that would be.'"

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A bid for literary immortality. Entertainment Weekly reported that two years ago Canadian journalist Rebecca Eckler paid $7,000 "at a charity auction to have her name used as a character in the next novel by her favorite author, fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood. Now, that book is out: Atwood’s delightful and well-reviewed dystopian novel The Year of the Flood."

"One of my character's first quotes is, 'Praise the Lord and spit. I'm too black and ugly for him . . . There you have it. Rebecca Eckler is no longer skinny, neurotic and Jewish," wrote Eckler in Macleans magazine.

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"Publishing has changed a great deal since I 'retired' five years ago. But 'edit' is still a verb. Editing is both an art and a skill, a craft," observed Sam Hamill--poet, editor and translator and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press--in an interview with the Kearney, Neb., Hub. "

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Book Trailer of the Day: Crush by Alan Jacobson (Vanguard Press).

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In their first blog entry on the Huffington Post's Book Channel, Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, owners of the Booksmith, San Francisco, Calif., recount how they quit "cushy corporate jobs" and wound up, to their great surprise, buying a bookstore.

And they did so in large part because they saw opportunities they believed others didn't see: "Why were [independent booksellers] not re-inventing their bookstores as innovative, thriving, value-adding, technology-embracing, community-building, trendsetting, financially successful enterprises? Why could they not compete successfully against the convenience of Amazon and the sales and distribution efficiencies of the large chains? Why did all independent bookstores have such terrible web sites? Why didn't they have great loyalty programs to reward their customers? What was the deal with the rude, arrogant, and I-couldn't-be-bothered bookstore clerks? And the final dilemma--while there seemed to be so much potential, why weren't the bookstore owners receptive to our help? There was no shortage of ideas!"

During Tarcher's promotion last Wednesday for The Power of Kindness by Piero Ferrucci--during which 10 staffers handed out 200 $1 bills each at five New York City bookstores (Shelf Awareness, September 23, 2009)--marketing manager Kevin Howell (r.) had a minor celebrity encounter at East West Living: he handed one of the bills to Kyan Douglas, co-host of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Howell noted that Douglas "was happy to accept our $1 and even more eager to hear about The Power of Kindness."

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Marcia Meredith Hensley, whose Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West (High Plains Press) contains letters, memoir excerpts, oral histories and other accounts by single women homesteaders of the early 1900s about their lives, won the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association award for regional reference. High Plains's Nancy Curtis noted that "as a very small indie publisher headquartered on a ranch in Wyoming and an author who lives in Farson, Wyo., population under 100, we were blown away to win an award from the booksellers."

To e or not to e? That is the question. Last month Books Inc. gathered a diverse panel at its flagship store in San Francisco's Opera Plaza to address the question.

The idea for the panel, said co-owner Margie Scott Tucker, came from a statement made by Alan Kaufman, novelist, memoirist, influential in the Spoken Word movement and editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature: "When I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit." Kaufman moderated the panel, called the "Great Internet Book Burning Panel." (No books e or otherwise were actually burned despite the catchy title.)

Other panelist included beat generation icon Herbert Gold, San Francisco Noir author Peter Plate, Ethan Watters, author of several books including Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? and Cleis Press's Brenda Knight, a participant in the Google case.

Kaufman began by reading an essay soon to be published in Barney Rossett's Evergreen Review, which is now an online-only publication, he noted. "The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now der Book," he read. "High-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle."

He called the book a "sacred object" and admitted he might be crazy for resisting an e-book-only world, but said: "I will fight it. I will resist. For not only is this effort at consolidation of the world's literature into the hands of a single central repository a demoralizing cultural prospect, but it is a move towards a new form of high-tech totalitarianism."

Peter Plate disagreed--somewhat. He pointed out that all technologies, social and political interactions and life itself are "always at the service of language." He continued: "Language, regardless of the technology, is in the hands of readers and writers, and it cannot be reduced."

Ethan Watters said he did not see parallels to the Holocaust and thought technology offers some democratizing opportunities. But he does worry, he went on, about some of the trends and does not want to see blogging replace the thoughtful work in books. He observed that right now some of the best bloggers are skilled, former magazine writers. What about the next generation?

"I think we need to have an electronic civil rights movement," said Brenda Knight. She noted that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google's purpose was to help people decide what kind of lives they want to live. To much applause from the audience, she asked, "Doesn't that sound like control to anyone?"

Herb Gold remembered fondly the time when literary writers were rock stars and lamented a technological world where casually finding out what those around you are reading is impossible. You can't exactly go up to someone reading a Kindle and ask what they are reading, he pointed out.

During the Q&A, a local school teacher commented that he has seen his students engage in stories and storytelling with new technologies in "more vivid" ways. "Is this terrible or is this brilliant?" he asked.
 
And that just might be the question.--Bridget Kinsella
  

Today on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Rich Benjamin, author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (Hyperion, $24.99, 9781401322687/1401322689).

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Tomorrow morning on Good Morning America: Steve Harvey, author of Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment (Amistad, $23.99, 9780061728976/0061728977).

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Tomorrow on Fox's Wendy Williams Show: David Alan Grier, author of Barack Like Me: The Chocolate-Covered Truth (Touchstone, $24.99, 9781439154922/1439154929). He will also appear tomorrow on CNN's Joy Behar Show.

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Tomorrow on the Martha Stewart Show: Laura Day, author of How to Rule the World from Your Couch (Atria, $24, 9781439118207/1439118205).

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Tomorrow on the Dr. Oz Show: Stephanie Wilder-Taylor, author of It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections from a Terminally Optimistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman (Simon Spotlight, $23.99, 9781416954149/1416954147).

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Tomorrow on Hardball with Chris Matthews: Max Cleland, author of Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781439126059/1439126054).

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Tomorrow on Talk of the Nation: Taylor Branch, author of The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (Simon & Schuster, $35, 9781416543336/1416543333).

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Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report: Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 9780374231965/0374231966).

The film version of Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo now has a U.S. distributor. Variety reported that Music Box Films acquired the U.S. rights to the Swedish thriller, "which has grossed almost $100 million internationally and has still to open in Germany. The $13 million pic, the first in the 'Millennium' trilogy based on Stieg Larsson's international bestsellers, is slated for U.S. release early next year. It has been sold to 30 territories. . . . The next pic in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire, has already taken $16 million from four foreign markets. The third film, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, is in post-production and will be released this year."

Ian Frazier has won the 2009 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his book Lamentations of the Father. This marks a repeat for the frequent contributor to the New Yorker: his Coyote vs. Acme won the first Thurber Prize in 1997.

Runners-up for the Thurber Prize this year were:

• Sloane Crosley for I Was Told There'd Be Cake.
• Don Lee for Wrack and Ruin.
• Laurie Notaro for The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death: Reflections on Revenge, Germaphobia, and Laser Hair Removal.

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The shortlist for the Writers' Trust of Canada prizes, according to the National Post, includes:

Fiction

• Fences in Breathing by Nicole Brossard, translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
• Generation A by Douglas Coupland
• The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon
• Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
• Eva's Threepenny Theatre by Andrew Steinmetz

Nonfiction

• Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life by Brian Brett
• The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis
• Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds by Trevor Herriot
• The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships by Erika Ritter
• The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin

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Soon after he arrived in New York City from Pittsburgh, Pa., in June 1949, Andy Warhol established himself as a highly successful commercial artist. His many prestigious magazine and advertising clients appreciated three qualities Warhold exhibited: his originality, his ability to tweak mundane design into something eye-catching and his incredible work ethic. In their survey of Warhol's career from 1960 to 1968 (aka, the Glory Years), Tony Scherman and David Dalton point out that his clients had no idea of another of Warhol's abilities: genius for manipulation. These four talents would equip Warhol for greatness.

Success as a commercial artist didn't open the most important doors, however. Warhol had small exhibits of whimsical mixed media drawings (in the manner of his commercial work) at second-tier galleries in the 1950s, but nobody took him seriously. He asked a friend, filmmaker Emile de Antonio, why his idols Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (fine artists who were also gay like Warhol) didn't invite him into their exclusive circle. De Antonio answered, "Why Andy, how could they? You're too queer."

To break out of the confines of the commercial-artist box, Warhol began painting in earnest in September 1960, determined to find new approaches that would draw attention and respect. Scherman and Dalton pay particular attention to this period, and their brilliant description of his evolution from 1960 to 1962 essentially defines the genesis of Andy Warhol. His eye for visual snap, openness to accidents and visceral connection to 1960s cultural changes led to his creation of the work we now associate with him: Campbell soup can paintings, Liz, Jackie and Marilyn portraits and, of course, the Brillo boxes. Whenever people asked if he was joking, Warhol would reply that he was dead serious, but with a campy vagueness that left skeptics unconvinced.

Warhol's first show of Campbell soup can paintings, in Los Angeles in 1962, garnered mocking press and sold only one painting (for $100). Los Angeles could laugh, but Warhol had found his groove. When Pop Art toppled Abstract Expressionism from art world dominance at the end of 1962, he was at the center of the movement, and his first New York solo show at the Stable Gallery proclaimed another area of his genius: publicity magnet.

Warhol grew as a brand and a celebrity from 1962 onward no matter what he did and how much he made. We're still mesmerized by him, and the paintings from his brief, truly creative period remain the gold standard (dig it, Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car) from 1963 sold for $71.7 million in 2007).--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A riveting examination of how Andy Warhol became a legend, complete with delicious details of dollar values, sexual train wrecks, damaged friends, outrageous happenings and even gunfire in the Factory.