A new playbook for Kirkus Reviews. Herb Simon, owner of the NBA's Indiana Pacers and co-owner of Tecolote Books, Montecito, Calif., has purchased Kirkus from the Nielsen Business Media, according to the New York Times. Terms were not disclosed. Nielson had announced last December it was closing the magazine (Shelf Awareness, December 11, 2010).

Chief executive of the re-named Kirkus Media will be Marc Winkelman, who is also a co-owner of Tecolote Books as well as chief executive of Calendar Holdings and the owner of several chains of seasonal retailers.

Winkelman told the Times that the company would "retain its editorial leadership," including editor Elaine Szewczyk and managing editor Eric Liebetrau.

"With the growth of e-books and e-reading devices, no one can really see the future of publishing," Simon observed. "But turmoil like this creates opportunities. At a time when even the definition of a book is changing, my love of books makes me want to be part of the solution for the book publishing industry."

Winkelman added: "Over the years librarians have submitted a lot of comments to Kirkus about things they would like to see enhanced. We hope to do that and make Kirkus even more relevant in the world of book buying and book reading.”

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As part of a wider effort to introduce an "open strategy" for digital reading, Scribd "plans to launch a 'send to mobile' feature later this month that allows users to get most of the 10 million documents stored on the site to reading devices beyond the personal computer," including Amazon's Kindle, Sony Readers and B&N's Nook, as well as "advanced phones such as Apple's iPhone," the Wall Street Journal reported. The company is also creating software that could be used by device makers to embed the ability to search, browse and read Scribd content into their e-readers.

Scribd is "trying to find opportunity in the current market chaos," said Alan Weiner, a Gartner analyst. "This initial foray is a position statement as it is a product release for Scribd. It's going to be incumbent on them to make it more simple going forward."

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Publishers and Amazon may be working out their differences regarding e-book pricing, but the New York Times wondered whether customers will stage their own insurrection, noting that during the past year, "the most voracious readers of e-books have shown a reflexive hostility to prices higher than the $9.99 set by Amazon.com and other online retailers for popular titles."

"I just don’t want to be extorted," said Kindle owner Joshua Levitsky. "I want to pay what it’s worth. If it costs them nothing to print the paper book, which I can’t believe, then they should be the same price. But I just don’t see how it can be the same price."

"There are people who don’t always understand what goes into an author writing and an editor editing and a publishing house with hundreds of men and women working on these books," observed Mark Gompertz, executive v-p of digital publishing at Simon & Schuster. "If you want something that has no quality to it, fine, but we’re out to bring out things of quality, regardless of what type of book it is."

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Marcus Books, San Francisco, Calif., is a 50-year-old institution that "has long been a gathering place for African-American authors," the Wall Street Journal reported. Now the bookstore faces the possibility of having to close after a 40% sales plunge during the past two years. Owner Blanche Richardson has renegotiated her lease, is fundraising and has asked authors for help.

"To even have to contemplate closing this place, with all of its history, is painful to think about," she said.

Terry McMillan is one author who has answered the call. "Marcus Books isn't just a bookstore," she said. "From helping fledgling black writers find an audience to actually playing a role in the civil-rights movement, I can't imagine the Bay Area without it."

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In the spirit of Valentine's Day, Left Bank Books, St. Louis, Mo., "wants its fans to show the love." The Business Journal reported that Left Bank "is vying for a $35,000 grant from tax preparation software developer Intuit. The company that gathers the most positive testimonials this month wins. Left Bank Books is currently second in the nation with 481 comments, just behind Nashville-based BabyBearShop, which makes organic baby products and has 491 comments."

Co-owner Kris Kleindienst "called the outpouring of love heart-warming, particularly in a time of stiffer competition from Amazon.com and big-box bookstores," and the Business Journal handily supplied a link where fans could go to add to the vote total.

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Obituary note: Brooks Thomas, "who led Harper & Row Publishers during a period of turmoil and consolidation in the publishing industry and who was its chief executive when it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1987," has died, the New York Times reported. He was 78.

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A diary has been discovered that may have been used by William Faulkner as the model for a farm ledger that plays a key role in Go Down, Moses. The New York Times reported the journal was kept from the mid-1800s by Francis Terry Leak, a Mississippi plantation owner "whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood."

"I think it’s one of the most sensational literary discoveries of recent decades," said John Lowe, an English professor at Louisiana State University who is writing a book on Faulkner.

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While they may not make e-book bestseller lists any time soon, 65,000 rare first editions of 19th-century fiction from the British Library will be offered this spring for free download. In addition to "classic titles by famous 19th Century authors, many of the downmarket books known as 'penny dreadfuls' will also be made available to the public, including Black Bess by Edward Viles and The Dark Woman by J.M. Rymer," the Telegraph.

"Freeing historic books from the shelves has the potential to revolutionise access to the world’s greatest library resources," said Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library.

At her Seattle Post-Intelligencer's books blog, Nancy Mattoon offered a condensed useful history of the penny dreadful.

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Profitable cellphone epics. Keitai novels have attracted a strong readership in Japan, and the Los Angeles Times showcased a reluctant 15-year-old novelist as an example of the trend. Bunny "became one of Japan's top authors of a genre called keitai--cellphone--novels. After getting its start as a tale told on tiny cellular screens, her three-volume novel Wolf Boy x Natural Girl has gone on to sell more than 110,000 paperback copies since its release in May, according to Starts Publishing Co.... Wolf Boy has grossed more than $611,000."

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"Three novels of past and present" make up NPR's What We're Reading list for this week: Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett, Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris and The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason.

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"The Master of Rampling Gate," a vampire story by Anne Rice that was originally published in Redbook magazine in 1984, will be released March 1 in a multimedia edition thanks to an agreement reached between the author and video book company Vook, the Associated Press reported. The video book includes an author interview and will be available for purchase through the iPhone, iPod touch and other digital devices.

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Artist Timothy McSweeney, the inadvertent namesake for Dave Eggers's publishing venture, died in late January, the New York Times noted. The death was reported on the McSweeney’s website.

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Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, selected his top 10 books on boxing for the Guardian. "When I was growing up, my brother went through a whole catalogue of sports both in and outside the house," he recalled. "Football was banned because we wrecked all of our mum's plants. Cricket ended after a hat trick of broken windows. So we turned to boxing, which turned out to be something I would write about in Fighting Ruben Wolfe, and read about for years to come."

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Anti book trailer of the day: Toby: A Man by Todd Babiak (HarperCollins Canada).

 

Three generations of booksellers were on hand for the book launch on Tuesday of James McGrath Morris's Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (HarperCollins) at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, N.M. Co-owner Mary Wolf (left), with newborn Jackson, stands with her husband, Sam Wolf, and her co-owner and mother, Dorothy Massey, along with Morris and bookseller Phil Geronimo.

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 this week from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Tuesday and focuses on political and historical books as well as the book industry. The following are highlights for this coming weekend. For more information, go to Book TV's website.

Saturday, February 13

8 a.m. Danielle Ofri, author of Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients (Beacon, $24.95, 9780807073209/0807073202), addresses health care and immigration policy from a personal perspective. (Re-airs Saturday at 11 p.m.)

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment that first aired in 2001, Sally Satel, author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, $16, 9780465071838/046507183X), contended that the trend toward taking race, sexual orientation and oppression into account when organizing treatment deflects the focus from science-based healing and prevention.       

7 p.m. Micheline Maynard, author of The Selling of the American Economy: How Foreign Companies Are Remaking the American Dream (Broadway Business, $26, 9780385520522/0385520522), argues that foreign investment in the U.S. has had a positive impact on the economy and the lives of American workers. (Re-airs Sunday at 2 a.m. and 2 p.m.)

9 p.m. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, author of On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (Business Plus, $28.99, 9780446561938/0446561932), discusses actions he took in response to the 2008 economic collapse. (Re-airs Sunday at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.)

10 p.m. After Words. Tom Blanton interviews Garry Wills, author of Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin, $27.95, 9781594202407/1594202400). Wills looks at how the atomic bomb increased the power of the president and transformed the United States. (Re-airs Sunday at 9 p.m. and Monday at 12 a.m. and 3 a.m.)

Sunday, February 14

2:45 p.m. Phyllis Bennis, co-author with David Wildman of Ending the War in Afghanistan: A Primer (Olive Branch Press, $10, 9781566567855/1566567858), examines key issues regarding the country's role in the conflict. (Re-airs Monday at 5:45 a.m.)

7 p.m. S.M. Plokhy, author of Yalta: The Price of Peace (Viking, $29.95, 9780670021413/0670021415), refutes the contention that President Roosevelt ceded too much to Stalin at the landmark conference after World War II. (Re-airs Monday at 4 a.m. and Saturday, February 20, at 8 p.m.)

 

Katherine Heigl (Grey's Anatomy) will play Stephanie Plum in a film version of One for the Money, based on Janet Evanovich's novel. Variety reported that Reese Witherspoon had been "attached to take on the role, but the project has been dormant for several years. Heigl's interest has put the project back on the fast track."

 

Junot Diaz, Maxine Hong Kingston and M.L. Liebler are the recipients of the 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers awards, which honor "authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community." Nonprofit literary organization Poets & Writers, which announced the 2010 winners Wednesday, also named Pat Strachan, a senior editor at Little, Brown, winner of this year's editor's award for "outstanding contribution to the publication of poetry or literary prose over a sustained period of time." 

 

British author Philip Reeve burst onto the American children's book scene with a stunning debut novel, Mortal Engines, that plunged readers into a futuristic world of traction cities with no moorings, inhabited by characters with no loyalties. With a background in comedy and cartooning, and trained as an artist, he first entered children's books as an illustrator on Scholastic UK's Horrible Histories and Murderous Maths series. Reeve's works share in common a cinematic portrayal of alternate worlds, whether he is projecting into the future or mining Arthurian legends. We caught up with him at ALA in Boston last month, his first trip to the U.S. In April, he will publish Fever Crumb (Scholastic, $17.99, 9780545207195/0545207193) for ages 12-up, a prequel of sorts to the Mortal Engines Quartet.

Do you think that the sense of timing required in both comedy and comics has helped you in your fiction writing as well?

Comedy is quite mechanical. If you don't get a laugh when you want it or if it's not big enough, you can kind of tweak it a little bit and then, hurray, you get the laugh. Or not. Sometimes you realize it won't work and so you chuck it and do something else. It does teach you not to be precious with stuff. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was actually quite good training.

Did you know when you wrote Mortal Engines that it would continue as a series?

I think when you're not published, the only thing you can think about is getting published. I didn't have any plan in mind, I just thought, "If I can get this printed, that would be great, and then I can get back to illustration." It wasn't until it was out that Scholastic said, "What will you do next?" And I thought, "Oh, God, right." So after that, I kind of came up with two plans: one of which was the Arthur book, which became Here Lies Arthur, but then more ideas for the Mortal Engines world came into my head, so I ended up doing that first, and finishing up the quartet.

Did you start Arthur and then set it aside to finish the Mortal Engines Quartet?

Arthur was something I'd been thinking about for a long, long time. Soon after Mortal Engines was published, I sat down and wrote an early version of the first three or four chapters, and then decided to do other things, then came back to Arthur a few years later.

Here Lies Arthur was so timely when it came out in 2008. Did world events inform the book?

I suppose the whole business of Merlin as a sort of spin doctor was very much inspired by what was happening in British politics at the time. Certainly the government that came in 1997, the Labor government that's been in power ever since, is a construct of spin doctors. In a way [Arthur] was quite a deliberate response. But beyond that I wasn't trying to be relevant to contemporary events.

There were a couple of things I had to change in Here Lies Arthur. I don't want to put myself too closely to contemporary events because even very big things have actually quite a short life. This is something I learned in comedy. Something could happen on a Monday and you go into your show on Thursday, and everybody's forgotten about it.

It seems that every major episode from Arthurian legend was addressed in your book.

A lot of what I'm trying to do is recapture the enjoyment I got from the books I was reading when I was 10, 11 and 12. Most of the books I was reading tended to be about boys. The boys had adventures, and the girls waited at home or stood and screamed and waited to be rescued. So if I could put girls into the center of the story, that's one way that I can stake my own claim to the territory.

What were some of your favorites?

Rosemary Sutcliffe's books were big favorites of mine and still are. Things like Eagle of the Ninth, books set mostly during the Roman and Dark Ages in Britain. Here Lies Arthur is hugely indebted to her in some ways--it's not her sort of book, I'm sure she would have hated it--but that world, that period, that sense of living in the landscape, the weather and grittiness of it I think I get a lot from her books. There's also fantasy--Tolkien and Fritz Leiber. And science fiction--Ray Bradbury, Asimov I read a lot when I was 12 and 13. That's clearly fed into the Mortal Engines Quartet and Fever Crumb.

It's interesting that you thought of Mortal Engines as a stand-alone book because there's so much of that world that continues to develop through the series. Did you feel it calling back to you?

Yes. When I finished Darkling Plain, and [the Quartet] was ended, I thought I'd probably invent another world to set stories in. But inevitably, the world of Mortal Engines has got all the stuff that I wanted to write about. Before, I'd been gradually building this world out geographically, but I thought it might be quite nice to build it out in time as well. You don't meet the same characters, by and large. There are different concerns, but anybody who enjoyed the first four I think will see how the world of Fever Crumb is going to turn into the world of Mortal Engines. Theoretically I could now fill up the time between Fever Crumb and Mortal Engines with new stuff. We'll see how long I can keep going before people get tired of it.

In Fever Crumb, the Scriven and the humans actually look different from each other. Were you raising questions about how we see others, how we jump to conclusions?

I don't try to raise things particularly. I'm just trying to tell an interesting story. Inevitably it's colored by the real world. The fear of other people is part of being human, from the earliest tribes of hominids. In building an imaginary world, you try to ground it in reality, and that's part of reality.

The thing about the Scriven, the speckled people that [the humans are] all frightened of and dislike, is that they are quite frightening and dislikable. This isn't some minority who'd been persecuted. It's more like the French Revolution, only with the aristocrats being actually a slightly different species. They have been hugely oppressive and cruel and disagreeable. They're horrible. But so are the other lot. I try not to go into black and white. That's how fantasy always used to be. I think it's probably changed, but the stuff I grew up on would be, "Here are the good guys and here are the bad guys, and they're going to fight and fight and fight until the goodies win eventually." I don't want to do that. I'd rather have lots and lots of shades of gray.--Jennifer M. Brown

 

"At least I'll have my enemies in front of me, on the battlefield, and I'll be surrounded by men I can trust. Here I never know what to think about the person in front of me," Julius Caesar confides as he anticipates a new military campaign far from Rome. In the week before the fateful Ides of March, he couldn't be more right about his precarious position in the capital of the empire he rules as dictator.

Although we are familiar with the story's bloody outcome from many sources, Valerio Massimo Manfredi (The Last Legion) makes it fresh by setting multiple fictional plot lines in motion. From distant Cisalpine Gaul, the trusted centurion Publius Sextius is charging at top speed to tell Caesar of a plot on his life. Publius has also dispatched back-up couriers to ensure the message gets through. All roads may lead to Rome, but Manfredi builds nail-biting suspense by having the messengers take roads in bad condition, battered by storms and infested with agents determined to stop them. The race against time to alert Caesar that "the Eagle is in danger" is tense and harrowing. Within Rome's walls, calm is not the order of the day either. Caesar suffers recurring seizures and senses "a certain tension in the air, there are... signs... clues that something is about to happen."

Caesar has loving support from his physician, his dutiful wife, Calpurnia, and others, but we know the real threat lies in the Roman Senate. Manfredi takes us inside the home of Brutus for meetings of the conspirators; he fictionalizes debates about ways to proceed and whom to invite into the plot. How was the conspiracy kept quiet in a city so rife with intrigue and betrayal? Ultimately it wasn't, Manfredi postulates, but the message with critical details was as difficult to deliver to Caesar within the city limits as from Gaul.

Purists demanding slavish adherence to the historical record are probably wise to skip this version, but fans of the intrigue of HBO's Rome and the heart-in-mouth chases of the Bourne trilogy will delight in Manfredi's imaginative melding of the conventions of historical novels and thrillers. In addition to all the nonstop action and heinous conspiracy, there are many memorable interludes, including one in which Cleopatra works Marc Antony's weakness for her with, "I'm alone in this city. There's no one I can count on." Like Caesar, Cleopatra was right there, both for herself and for everyone else.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A fast-paced thriller reimagines the tensions and conspiracies that climaxed in the assassination of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate.

 

The following were the bestselling titles at independent bookstores in and around Chicago during the week ended Sunday, February 7:

Hardcover Fiction

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
2. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
3. Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
4. Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler
5. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
3. Just Kids by Patti Smith
4. On the Brink by Henry Paulsen
5. Staying True by Jenny Sanford

Paperback Fiction

1. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
3. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
4. A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
5. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Paperback Nonfiction

1. Food Rules by Michael Pollan
2. The Lost City of Z by David Grann
3. Joker One by Donovan Campbell
4. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
5. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Children's

1. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
2. 39 Clues Series #7: The Viper's Nest by Peter Lerangis
3. Henry in Love by Peter McCarty
4. Percy Jackson #1: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
5. Percy Jackson #4: Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan

Reporting bookstores: Anderson's, Naperville and Downers Grove; Read Between the Lynes, Woodstock; the Book Table, Oak Park; the Book Cellar, Lincoln Square; Lake Forest Books, Lake Forest; the Bookstall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka; and 57th St. Books; Seminary Co-op; Women and Children First, Chicago.

[Many thanks to the reporting bookstores and Carl Lennertz!]