Kurt Vonnegut died last night in New York City at age 84. The New York Times, which in one edition called him a "writer of classics of the American counterculture," said that he had suffered "irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago."

Vonnegut's best-know title was Slaughterhouse-Five. Other works included Cat's Cradle and God Bless You.

In our house, Vonnegut remains a legend for once inspiring our engineer brother, who has rarely read fiction unless it was assigned to him by a teacher, to engage in an unusual spurt of reading simply for the fun of it.

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Women & Children First Bookstore in Chicago is "fighting for survival," according to the Windy City Times. Co-owner Linda Bubon said that sales have slid in the past three years, due to competition from chains and the Internet. The paper wrote, "Things have gotten so bad at W&CF that [the owners] confirm the store must now plan month-to-month, not long-term. And the possibility that W&CF might close before the end of the summer is very real, they confirmed."

Co-owner Ann Christophersen, a former president of the ABA, added, "What it ultimately comes down to is: whether people in the community, and the city as a whole, decide it matters enough that we exist and then make their shopping decisions based on that. . . . We want people’s support, and we need it now. By that we mean, that they buy their books here."

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A pair of organizations in Arkansas will benefit from the closing of a Books-A-Million bookstore in Tennessee. The Herald of Arkansas State University reported that area resident Lewis Slaughter, who purchased the remaining inventory and fixtures from the former bookstore, has donated shelving to the Walnut Ridge Army Flying School Museum and more than 35,000 books to the Lawrence County Children's Shelter. The shelter will hold a book fair fundraiser this weekend.

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BBC Audiobooks America is launching a retail audiobook publishing program that will be distributed to the trade in North America by Perseus Distribution. The new line has two imprints--BBC Audio and BBC Radio--and expands the company's institutional audio publishing program in the U.S. Titles will include mysteries, literary fiction, women's fiction, thrillers and narrative nonfiction.

The first list, making its debut this month, includes Roots by Alex Haley ("the first time on commercial audio"), The Complete Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, The Education of Henry Adams, Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin and The History Boys by Alan Bennett.

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Standup guy to judge standup mom contest: yesterday on the Early Show, Mitch Albom, author of For One More Day, announced a writing competition to be held on gather.com to celebrate Mother's Day. Contestants submit an original story about a childhood memory of a moment when their mother stood up for them.

Members of Gather.com will pick 10 finalists. Albom makes the final selection, which will be announced on the Early Show on May 10. In addition to appearing with Albom on the show, the winner will receive a seven-night cruise vacation for two from Royal Caribbean International.

Contest co-sponsor Borders is promoting the competition to customers who receive the retailer's "Shortlist" e-mails.

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Bargain Book News featured an essay, "The Makings of a Good Buyer," in which Mark Zobrosky highlighted the qualities he believes are indispensable to the position. According to the author, "First, you must find a person whose undying goal is realizing that sales and profitability as well as focusing on achieving the company's 'plan' is priority. This person should be a linear, 'Big Picture' thinker. They are the type of person who undertakes initiatives without being told to do so. He or she understands that product selection, pricing and promotional activities all go hand in hand." Zobrosky, who "has spent over thirty years serving 'chain store retailers' in senior level positions," contends that retailers are increasingly "looking for 'true merchants,' people with an innate sense of what is likely to work and what probably won't; probably a combination of inner sense, good disciplined training and experience to go with excellent communication skills."

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On the eve of the London Book Fair, the Saffron Walden Reporter reported that Harts Bookshop in Saffron Walden will be sold to the W.H. Smith chain. Sounding a familiar refrain, managing director Martin Turnbull told the paper that "Internet and supermarket sales" competition is increasing and that "the book market place is changing to one where a book is a commodity product increasingly purchased on the basis of price and convenience."

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More news from the U.K.: wholesaler Gardners Books is launching what it calls a "digital warehouse," which will allow publishers to link digital files, e-books, audio downloads and digital electronic content with Gardners's Internet and bricks-and-mortar retail customers.

In a statement, Bob Jackson, Gardners's commercial director, said, "Our aim is to ensure all our high street retailers can participate in selling e-books, audio downloads alongside physical books, and utilise the newly developing extended bibliographic information and Internet trading experiences which are increasingly available to support more traditional selling opportunities."

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Sterling Publishing has made the following promotions:

• Jason Prince, formerly v-p, sales and marketing, is now v-p, associate publisher, a new position.
• Jeremy Nurnberg, formerly director of trade sales, has been named v-p, trade and institutional sales.
• Frances Gilbert, formerly editor-in-chief, children's books, is now v-p, editorial director, children's books.
• Josh Wood, formerly trade sales manager, has been promoted to director, trade and institutional sales.
• Ron Davis, formerly v-p, special sales, is now v-p, special and international sales.  

Once the destination for discovering big books in the world of children's publishing, the Bologna Book Fair is now rarely the place where a book is "unveiled." Most foreign scouts--thanks to the Internet and annual or semi-annual trips made to the U.S.--have already seen the blockbuster American titles. And, conversely, as Little, Brown's Megan Tingley put it, "Anything that's going to be big or auctioned at the fair, you know about ahead of time and you plan for it."
 
But the "unveiling" all depends on the timing, according to Joan Rosen, head of subsidiary rights for HarperCollins. She points to the Septimus Heap series, for which Katherine Tegen had won all world rights at an auction just a week and a half before the 2003 fair. Rosen took a 40-page excerpt with her to Bologna, where "Bloomsbury bought it on the stand [as did three others]. People kept coming to borrow the excerpt and photocopied it at the fair. We sold probably 10 after the fair, and we're up to 29 or 30 [countries]," Rosen said. "Now we can e-mail [manuscripts] from our BlackBerries."
 
For Tingley, timing came into play a bit differently. Little, Brown had planned to present Stephenie Meyer's debut book, Twilight, at Bologna in 2005, but a Finnish publisher got hold of a manuscript in January and made a bid (sparking an auction), and a Russian publisher made an offer on the book, sight unseen. "Once those two things happened, we realized we shouldn't wait for Bologna," Tingley said. As a result, the company used Bologna as an opportunity for its 8-10 publishing partners to meet to exchange marketing ideas and discuss translation challenges and cover approaches.
 
Bologna has become the rendezvous point for such "summits," or global marketing strategies, for a particular series or author. The original summit may have originated with Scholastic, resulting from the success of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series globally in the late 1980s. "People were sending us things from all around the world, examples of the kinds of promotions they were doing," recalled Jean Feiwel, then head of Scholastic's editorial program and now senior v-p and publisher at Holtzbrinck/Feiwel & Friends. "We wanted to coordinate and build Goosebumps as a brand in a constructive and coherent way. And then for new countries coming on, we wanted to give them the benefit of our experiences in various markets."

But for single literary titles it was an "uphill battle" for years, said Steven Roxburgh, publisher of Front Street/Boyds Mills Press and a longtime advocate of books in translation. That changed, he continued, with the attention from awards committees such as ALA's Printz Award and the Los Angeles Times (Per Nilsson's You and You and You, translated from the Swedish and published by Front Street, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for young people). He had always relied on what he calls a "cluster" of foreign-language publishers with similar tastes to guide him in selecting titles, but as happens in U.S. publishing, people have begun to move around among different houses, so he's had to rely on more traditional means. "It's not as easy as it used to be," he said. "I feel I have to go deeper and get readers reports and such."
 
Arthur Levine, whose imprint at Scholastic celebrates its 10th anniversary with a dinner in Bologna, has also been committed to publishing foreign books in translation (his books have won several Batchelder Awards for translation, including the 2006 winner, An Innocent Soldier by Josef Holub).  He agreed that such relationships require tending. "Some rights people have been in the business a long time and know [editors'] specific tastes," Levine said. "But then there are young people who don't know I've been publishing Ulises Wensell for years. When you're sitting across from someone and go through some books together, they can see what you're excited about or interested in."
 
Many editors still go to Bologna secretly hoping to find that unknown gem. Ten years ago, it was just such a conversation that led Levine to a debut novel by an unknown author. "I went through the whole Bloomsbury list that she was presenting at that time, and the rights director folded her arms and said, 'I see that nothing is hitting the mark; what are you looking for?' I described generally what I was hoping to find, and she said, 'Well, we have a new person we're publishing this summer, and here's the agent's name, you should call.' " The book was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling. Can that sort of thing still happen today? Maybe, with a little magic.--Jennifer M. Brown

This morning on the Early Show: actress Victoria Rowell, author of The Women Who Raised Me (Morrow, $25.95, 9780061246593/006124659X).

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Today Good Morning America talks with supermodel Paulina Porizkova whose debut novel is A Model Summer (Hyperion, $23.95, 9781401303266/1401303269).

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The Fox Morning Show shapes up with Jillian Michaels, author of Making the Cut: The 30-Day Diet and Fitness Plan for the Strongest, Sexiest You (Crown, $24.95, 9780307382504/0307382508).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm, part two of an interview with Norman Mailer, whose new book is The Castle in the Forest (Random House, $27.95, 9780394536491/0394536495). As the show describes the interview: "In this conversation about the bureaucratic, dim-witted culture that characterized the German provinces of Hitler's childhood, Mailer reveals that his narrator, an assistant to the devil, is himself a bureaucrat. Bureaucracy becomes the model for the world of this novel, down to the smallest detail--the beehives kept by Hitler's father. Mailer waxes hilarious about the sexual behavior of bees."

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Deborah Rodriguez, author of Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil (Random House, $24.95, 9781400065592/1400065593).

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Today on Rachael Ray's show, her "Queen of Tips," Hannah Keeley, author of Hannah Keeley's Total Mom Makeover: The Six-Week Plan to Completely Transform Your Home, Health, Family, and Life (Little, Brown, $16.99, 9780316017191/0316017191).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Richard Preston, author of The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (Random House, $25.95, 9781400064892/1400064899).

 

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday 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 Web site.

Saturday, April 14

6 p.m. Encore Booknotes. In a segment first aired in 2001, Edward Steers, Jr., author of Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (University Press of Kentucky, $22, 9780813191515/0813191513), talked about his own theories about the assassination, which took place on this day 142 years ago.

7 p.m. History. Clive James, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker, talks about his new book, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (Norton, $35, 9780393061161/0393061167), which consists of biographical essays about more than 100 of the most important people of the 20th century.

9 p.m. After Words. Roland Flamini, a foreign policy columnist for CQ Weekly and formerly chief international correspondent at UPI and a foreign correspondent and editor at Time magazine, interviews Ali Allawi, former Iraqi Minister of Defense, Trade and Finance, a leader of the anti-Saddam Hussein movement and author of The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale University Press, $28, 9780300110159/0300110154). In the book, Allawi details the astounding blunders made by the U.S. after the invasion and proposes solutions to the many problems there. (Re-airs Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

10 p.m. General Assignment. On the second anniversary of the publication of The World Is Flat (FSG, $30, 9780374292799/0374292795), which has been updated but has yet to appear in paperback, Thomas Friedman talks about his writing style, the book's publication and the concept of the flat world. (Re-airs on Sunday at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. and on Monday at 12 a.m.)

The winners of the 2007 E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards, sponsored by the Association of Booksellers for Children, are:

• Picture book: Houndsley and Catina by James Howe, illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay (Candlewick)
• Novel: Alabama Moon by Watt Key (FSG)

The awards will be presented at ABC's annual dinner during BEA.

Marr's seductive first novel will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Stephenie Meyer's debut book, Twilight, due to the strong, intelligent high school girl at its center, who has a close male friend and experiences a magnetic pull toward an otherworldly, charismatic man. But there the similarity ends. Marr here creates a fully realized faerie realm with a mysterious hold over Aislinn, whose mother "died in childbirth." Gram, who raised Aislinn, has warned her about the evils of faeries since she was small. Like her mother and grandmother, the teen has the Sight, though she hides her gift. One day, an exceptionally powerful fairy, Keenan, begins to pursue Aislinn ("tan and too beautiful to touch . . .  he moved as if he were in charge of everyone and everything"), and all the boundaries that she thought kept her safe begin to break down. She seeks refuge in the train car that her friend Seth has converted into a home (steel weakens fairies), and confides in him. As Aislinn's and Seth's feelings for each other grow stronger, so do Keenan's efforts in pursuit of her. Keenan, the Summer King, is convinced that Aislinn is the queen for whom he has searched for centuries. If he is right, together they can restore balance to the faerie world--and the earth, whose environment is off-kilter because of the Winter Queen's undue concentration of power. Marr may not make much of a case for the environmental thread, but she does paint a tantalizing picture of the faerie world: the sensuous, vapid Summer Girls, the revelry of the Rath and Ruins club where the faeries congregate, and Donia, the Winter Girl who was so certain that she was the one meant to reign at Keenan's side. Aislinn's ability to straddle the real and faerie worlds is quite breathtaking, and readers will rapidly turn pages to see if she chooses the mortal Seth or the Summer King.--Jennifer M. Brown