Texas Pages

The Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live series has added three events for this season:

Julie Powell, author of Julie & Julia, appears 7:30 p.m. July 29 at the museum's Horchow Auditorium. A screening of the Nora Ephron movie is slated for 7:30 p.m. July 27 at the AMC NorthPark, and a "special Julia Child-inspired buffet dinner" is being offered at the museum as well.

Deborah Nadoolman Landis, an Academy Award-nominated costume designer, will discuss Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design 7 p.m. Aug. 27 at the Horchow Auditorium.

And Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Taylor Kidd will discuss Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story 7:30 p.m. Sept. 15 at First Presbyterian Church of Dallas. Sue Monk Kidd is also the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid's Chair.

Tickets are $30 for the public; $25 for DMA members, Friends of the Dallas Public Library, seniors, and educators; $15 for students. For Julie & Julia, tickets include the preview screening, but dinner is separate.

Details are available here.

As a critic and a blogger, you know that I am always interested in increasing interaction with my readers.

This, however, is not what I had in mind: Angry author Alice Hoffman has used Twitter to fire off a series of angry messages against a Boston Globe critic who didn't love her book The Story Sisters. Said tweets included questioning the critic's credentials, calling her a "moron," boasting of better writers who had reviewed her work ... and publishing the critic's phone number and encouraging followers to call and complain.

("Now any idiot can be a critic," one suggested. Well, she might have a point there.)

Her Twitter feed no longer exists, but the Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy blog has a rational look at the episode. And while it agrees that the Globe review was not exactly a model of critical perfection, the public venting does not exactly help Hoffman, "who instead of being wronged by a poor review comes off like an aspiring literary gang leader, dispensing orders 140 characters at a time."

The Times also has Hoffman's official statement on the matter; she offers the classic, "I'm sorry if I offended anyone."

You can still find her outraged tweets by visiting Gawker. (There, you can also read what a gun-toting Richard Ford once thought of Hoffman's criticism -- he's not from Texas, is he?)

Just don't get any ideas.

You'd think that the books blog would be a safe refuge from Michael Jackson stories. But the Los Angeles Times (via Shelf Awareness) says that store owners knew him as a book lover (not a fighter).

"He loved the poetry section," said Dave Dutton of the famous Dutton's Books in Brentwood. Brother Dirk added that Ralph Waldo Emerson was Jackson's favorite. "I think you would find a great deal of the transcendental, all-accepting philosophy in his lyrics."

His lawyer also noted his wide-ranging tastes:

Largely an autodidact, Jackson was quite well read, according to Jackson's longtime lawyer. "We talked about psychology, Freud and Jung, Hawthorne, sociology, black history and sociology dealing with race issues," Bob Sanger told the LA Weekly after the singer's death. "But he was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature . . . Freud and Jung -- go down the street and try and find five people who can talk about Freud and Jung."

For less lofty reading, Examiner.com compiled a list of Michael Jackson-related books.

And lest you worry that we're turning Texas Pages into a celebrity death blog, the closest I can find to a book-related story on Billy Mays is this Tom Dodge review of But Wait ... There's More. The review does not actually mention Mr. Mays, but it's definitely his turf.

Garrison Keillor is about to mark 35 years of A Prairie Home Companion. And in this interview, he gives a perfectly Keilloresque shout-out to the glory of bookstores:

"I love bookstores. I love to hold books in my hand. And to give that up is painful. It's like if Minnesota passed a law against fishing, it wouldn't affect the food supply that much. You know, if we passed a law against guys going out in a boat with a rod and a reel and bait and fishing for sunfish and crappies, people would still eat, nobody would go hungry who hadn't before. But it'd be painful. It's a part of our culture."

He also notes that his own bookstore, Common Good Books in St. Paul, is "sort of slowly making its way. I don't know. It's not making money. Nobody makes money with bookstores."

(Spotted on Shelf Awareness.)

NEW YORK (AP) -- The author of a new book about the wisdom of free products on the Web has acknowledged taking some liberties in his own work.
Chris Anderson, known for the influential business book "The Long Tail," said he was mistaken for using passages -- without attribution -- that closely resembled material from Wikipedia and other sources included in his latest release, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price."
"This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected," Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote on his blog Wednesday.
Anderson's book, coming out next month from Hyperion, includes information about the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch," about the meaning of a learning curve and about other subjects for which he depended on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia of user-contributed articles. The similarities were first reported by the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Hyperion issued a statement Wednesday: "We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book."
The book has first printing of 80,000 copies, which already have been shipped.

Our friends over in the Points section of The Dallas Morning News will launch the third annual Points Summer Book Club this month, and you're invited. They've picked a doozy of a book this year, with loads of local relevance and intrigue: The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, by former Wall Street Journal reporter Bryan Burrough. It's about the four "Big Four" oil barons who shaped much of what Texas is today. Extra credit: Can you name the Big Four? Find the answer at the bottom of this post.

The Associated Press reported this week that four long-out-of-print books by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. will be published again under a deal with Beach Press that was brokered with King's youngest son.

Dexter King called it a historic partnership that will bring his father's words to a global audience. Beacon, a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association, publishes books on social justice, human rights and racial equality.

The Boston-based publisher will release new editions of Stride Toward Freedom, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Trumpet of Conscience and Strength to Love in 2010. Under the agreement, Beacon will also compile King's writings, sermons, lectures and prayers into new editions with introductions by leading scholars.

LONDON (AP) -- The publisher of the wildly popular and very profitable "Harry Potter" books says it intends to fight a lawsuit alleging that author J.K. Rowling stole the idea for the series about the boy wizard.
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC is being taken to court in London by the estate of the late author Adrian Jacobs for copyright infringement, statements released Tuesday by the publishing house and legal representatives of the estate said.
"The estate ... claims that the book 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,' reproduces substantial parts of the works of Adrian Jacobs, 'The Adventures of Willy the Wizard,' without consent, and that in selling the books, Bloomsbury has infringed and continues to infringe copyright," said a statement on the Web site of London lawyers DMH Stallard, the firm representing the estate.

Want to know what the kids are reading this summer? Lilia Goldin at the Dallas Public Library, who helped distribute 10,000 book logs among the Dallas Public Library Branches, is kind enough to share the most popular titles from the book lists that kids are redeeming for prizes as part of the Mayor's Summer Reading Program.

Here they are:
One Potato, Two Potato by Cynthia DeFelice and Andrea U'Ren, which Lilia reports was the first choice for all elementary school kids
Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things by Lenore Look and LeUyen Pham
The Great Pig Search by Eileen Christelow
Surprises According to Humphrey by Betty G. Birney

Have your kids read any of these? Would love to hear their reviews!

The Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Theater Center wrapped up this year's Texas Bound series of readings (part of the DMA's Arts & Letters Live series) in fine form Monday night at the Kalita Humphreys Theater. All four pieces -- by Steve Almond, Richard Bausch, Sue Monk Kidd and Steve Martin -- were warmly received, and the audience was especially enthusiastic about seeing former DTC actor Randy Moore (who's now in Denver).

All of the actors were terrific, but to my eyes the standout was James Crawford in "Aren't You Happy for Me," by Bausch. Crawford brought a canny, completely believable mix of befuddlement, bemusement, outrage and horror to his characterization of a father who learns that his daughter, 23, is about to marry her babydaddy, a literature professor 40 years her senior (and 19 years senior to her dad).

Harriet Harris also charmed the crowd, reading the short story, "The Secret Life of Bees," by Sue Monk Kidd, which evolved into the best-selling novel and then the movie of the same name.

Speaking of Kidd, the DMA made a surprise announcement sure to please those who are dreading a long, desolate literary stretch before the next A&LL season: She and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, will make an appearance on Sept. 15 at First Presbyterian Church of Dallas. They'll discuss their upcoming joint memoir, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story, about a time when both were embarking on significant life changes. A&LL patrons will get a first look at the book, which comes out Sept. 8.

There're still two more events in the regular A&LL season: David Eagleman, Houston-based author of Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives, on June 19, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Alexandra Fuller on June 23. For tix and information, go here.

PHOTO: Actress Harriet Harris in an earlier Arts & Letters Live appearance.

Two Texas artists, Celia Alvarez Muñoz and Carmen Lomas García, make their mark in a revisionist history of artists called A Ver. Let's See is a collection of homages to Latino artists and their historical contributions. It's organized by UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Celia now lives in Arlington and was born in El Paso. Carmen now lives in California and was born in Kingsville.

After I posted that trailer for The Road, alert commenter "Drewbanger" spotted this excellent piece from Esquire, indicating that the the movie might actually have very little to do with the promotion. Or at least, that is the message to the faithful.

Tom Chiarella does a nice summary of the book's appeal and the dangers awaiting it in Hollywood:

[The movie] is adapted from a lyric, repetitive little book, one written in a fashion that nods at classic narrative structure only in its final pages. A book that has found two sorts of readers: the fanatics, who can't put it down, and the frustrated, who find it so dark, blatantly literary, rhythmically voicey, and without hope that they can't turn past page 3. While that doesn't necessarily frame it as a problem movie, it does make things hard to describe in the familiar contours of an X-meets-Y movie pitch. It's fair to wonder whether The Road will become an unimportant footnote in the wake of a best seller. Happens all the time. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Angela's Ashes. And movies mangle literary books, too. They turn arty and inexplicably beloved literary titles -- The English Patient or The Hours -- into arty and pretty forgettable movies.

Chiarella, it should be noted, has actually seen the movie. So when he says, "It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all," perhaps there is hope.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Alice Munro, the revered Canadian short story writer, has won the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement.
The award, announced Tuesday, is worth around $95,000.
Munro, 77, is known for such collections as "Friend of My Youth" and "The View from Castle Rock." Her short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" was adapted into the acclaimed film "Away from Her," starring Julie Christie.
Previous winners of the Booker international prize, presented every two years, include Albania's Ismail Kadare and Nigerian Chinua Achebe.

We've taken a lot of your feedback and have made several changes to the new GuideLive.com, including adding "GUIDELIVE IT!" sections at the top of each tab (Events, Movies, Restaurants and Performers) to help you search for things that matter most to you.

We encourage all of you authors out there to create your own Performer's page where you can tell people about yourself and your works, as well as link to your own sites. Another benefit of creating a Performer's page is that you can add it to listings for your book signings, talks and other events where you are featured, so people interested in going tcan quickly find out more information about you beforehand.

Just remember to search the Performers section first, because you might already be in there, in which case you can click "Report an error with this listing" and claim it to gain control over it.

Don't miss out on the next big read. Check out the list of bookstores and literary events. If you don't see your event listed, feel free to create it.

Give us a shout or leave comments below if you run across any other concerns regarding the new GuideLive.com.

Willard Spiegelman remains on a roll with his Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness. The folks at Legacy Books reported a solid turnout for his signing last week, and KERA's Jerome Weeks interviewed him for Think. (You can still see that here.)

As noted earlier, happy changes are taking place with our events coverage.

The good news is -- you'll find it easier than before to share books and arts stories via e-mail or Facebook.

But if you've bookmarked our books page, you're going to have to update it. It's now found here.

Questions? Concerns? We'd love to hear them. The "comments" button still works.

Take at look at the new GuideLive.com. The Dallas Morning News is upgrading its signature entertainment portal this week with a state-of-the-art, “go, see and do” utility you won’t want to leave home without.

From now on, when you type in GuideLive.com or click on “Things to do” you will discover, front and center, a simple search box that can find the event, movie, venue, restaurant or performer just right for you. It understands words you would normally use, so when you’re looking for something tomorrow, just type “tomorrow.” Then in one place, you’ll get our critics’ ratings and reviews, user reviews from across the Internet, often an option to purchase tickets, directions and nearby attractions, too.

We’ve got more things to do than ever at your fingertips. Look for sporting events, community and church events, art exhibitions – and if you don’t see an event you’re hosting, please add it!

You can still find all the coverage that our Guide staff provides about the arts and entertainment in our Entertainment channel on dallasnews.com (and linked from each relevant GuideLive.com listing). And we’ve finally added a comment box below each article, plus a way to share it or e-mail it to your friends.

Visit the new GuideLive.com!

Nan A. Talese, who drew worldwide attention two years ago for her criticism of Oprah Winfrey, is offering kinder words in the wake of Winfrey's recent apology to author James Frey.

"It takes a generous spirit to offer apologies and she has shown herself to be that in all these years," the publisher wrote in response to an e-mail from The Dallas Morning News. "Oprah stood behind the book when it came out, but did not endorse the distortions -- she said that quite eloquently at the start of the famous program. Brava."

Talese was publisher of Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and was with him when Winfrey tore into him on the air in 2006 after the work was discredited. At the 2007 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference in Grapevine, Talese called Winfrey's behavior "mean and self-serving."

But Frey recently told Vanity Fair that Winfrey had called him last fall and apologized. Talese wrote that she had not been in contact with Frey about the call, but she was pleased to hear about it.

Asked about current projects, the publisher expressed excitement about the success of The Woman Behind the New Deal, a biography of Frances Perkins by Kirstin Downey. And she is "thrilled" to be publishing Brodeck, an "amazing" novel by Philippe Claudel.

She may be in the spotlight more in coming months. In June, she'll mark her 50th anniversary with author Gay Talese. As noted in The New York T imes, Ecco has just released updated editions of Honor Thy Father and his famously well-researched opus on the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbor's Wife, and he tells New York magazine in a lengthy profile that he's now writing about Nan and their marriage.

He told the Times, "Nan says, 'What does he know about marriage? But I know about reporting."

(File photo/Associated Press)

Publishers Weekly reports that on-demand publishing surged past traditional publishing in number of titles produced last year.

The numbers, compiled by Bowker's Books in Print database:

New and revised titles produced by traditional production methods: 275,232, down 3 percent.

On-demand and short run titles: 285,394, up 132 percent.

PW explains: "The on-demand and short run segment is the method typically used by self-publishers as well as online publishers. With the decline in the number of traditional books released last year and the jump in on-demand, the number of on-demand titles topped those of traditional books for the first time."

On the Bowker site, Kelly Gallagher, the company's vice president of publisher services, said, "If you look beyond the numbers, you begin to see that 2008 was a pivotal year that benchmarks the changing face of publishing."

The University of Texas at Austin last week named Sarah Bird and Diane Wilson as 2010 Dobie Paisano fellows.

The coveted fellowships allow writers to live and work at the Paisano ranch, J. Frank Dobie's 254-acre retreat west of Austin. (Bucolic photos can be seen here.)
Sarah Bird is described in the press release as "a Texas Monthly columnist and the author of seven novels. Her latest novel, How Perfect Is That, a comic novel set in high and low Austin society, has won an Elle Magazine Reader's Prize and is a Good Housekeeping Magazine Recommended Read." (We reviewed her book here, and spoke with her about the book as well.)
Diane Wilson is described as "an activist and fourth-generation fisherwoman from the coast of Texas. She is the author of two books in An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift and Holy Roller: Growing Up in the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out; or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus. She is a co-founder of Code Pink, the women's anti-war group based in Washington, DC and is the co-founder of Texas Jail Project, which advocates for inmate rights in Texas county jails. "
An archived review of An Unreasonable Woman appears below.

The first trailer from The Road showed up last week. And while GalleyCat has gathered some reaction, I'll add that a transcript of my own thoughts upon watching it Saturday went something like this:

Ha! Somebody has made a parody of what The Road would look like if the adaptation of the best novel of the decade fell victim to every cliche in Hollywood! How funny!

Oh, my. Oh my.

Luckily, it's just a movie trailer. But judge for yourself, and let us know what you think.

The Dallas Museum of Arts' Arts & Letters Live series tonight blessed us a talk by two authors with strong Dallas connections: Dallas resident Kathleen Kent, author of The Heretic's Daughter, and Cristina Henríquez, former Dallas resident and author of The World In Half. They continued A&LL's absolutely stellar season -- anyone who still thinks Dallasites don't care about literature hasn't been paying attention to what the DMA has accomplished this season.

Ms. Henríquez recalled her early days in Dallas (she now lives in Chicago), when she was living in an Uptown apartment and thinking she and her husband could manage with one car -- he commuted to a job during the day; she worked on her writing at home. When she decided to look for a job, she landed an interview at D Magazine. On a 97-degree summer day, wearing a wool-blend suit, it took her a trolley ride and two buses to traverse the 1.7 miles to D's headquarters.

PHOTO by Joy Tipping: Cristina Henríquez (foreground) and Kathleen Kent at the DMA on Friday night.

Oprah Winfrey has apologized to James Frey, the author she excoriated when he admitted to having falsified portions of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces.

Frey told vanityfair.com that Winfrey called him last fall and explained that her attack had come, unfairly, from her own ego and sense of having been personally betrayed.

"It was a nice surprise to hear from her, and I really appreciated the call and the sentiment," Frey said. "When I heard her say, 'I felt I owe you an apology,' I was very grateful. As far as I'm concerned, that part of my career is over and behind me and I'm looking forward to writing more books."

Reuters news service said that a representative for Winfrey had confirmed the phone call and apology. "We invited him back on the show," last spring, Oprah's spokeswoman, Angela dePaul, told Time.com, but the reunion didn't work out.

The Vanity Fair site says that Frey and his wife, whose infant son died in July, recently adopted a toddler from a Russian orphanage. The author is at work on Illumination. "It's my idea of what it would be like if the Messiah were walking the streets of New York City right now."

Jane Sumner attended Bud Shrake's funeral on Tuesday. Here's what she saw:

Everyone who loved Texas literary legend Edwin "Bud" Shrake and could get there crowded into the Weed-Corley-Fish Chapel on Tuesday. Propped up with the floral arrangements near the casket was a big white sign Mad Dog Productions from Bud's wild days as ringleader of a band of hard-working, hell-raising Texas writers dubbed Mad Dogs. The sign then rode to the Texas State Cemetery in the back window of the hearse.
Fittingly, Bud's old friend Willie Nelson's songs bookended the hour-long service at the funeral home. Asleep at the Wheel front man Ray Benson put his broken heart into "I Can't Believe You're Gone" and in the most touching, get-out-the-hankies moment, Willie closed with "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground" - especially poignant since Bud was an unabashed believer in angels.
Filmmaker-writer Turk Pipkin, who officiated, looked over the SRO room and cracked that if the flu gets in here "we're going to lose every writer, songwriter and Democrat in Travis County." Fellow writers Gary Cartwright, Bud's friend of 50 years, and Bill Broyles, founding editor of Texas Monthly, spoke followed by Bud's sons Alan and Ben and granddaughter Heather Shrake.
At the cemetery beside the white marble monument of Bud's beloved companion Ann Richards, screenwriter Anne Rapp paid tribute to a dear friend, Jerry Jeff Walker sang "Dare of an Angel" and "My Buddy" and screenwriter-photographer Bill Wittliff reminded those gathered under the trees that, because of Bud's books, we "have him in our lives still."

The Austin-American Statesman was on hand and has photos as well.

The Dallas Museum of Arts' fabulous season of Arts & Letters Live is coming quickly to an end, but they saved some of the best for last. On Tuesday, journalist-author-adventurers Tony Horwitz (seated at right in photo) and David Grann (seated at left) captivated the audience with tales of history, derring-do (some of it their own) and the obsessive pull of a nearly century-old mystery.

Photo by Joy Tipping

So since I first blogged about Dan Baum's serial Twittering of how he lost his New Yorker job, things have gotten really good.

First, Baum's series started dishing about internal New Yorker culture, including his experiences with editor David Remnick. (You can cheat and read about it on his Web site, but really, you need the tweets for full effect.)

Then the other great narrative tweeter I mentioned, Susan Orlean, started offering her own 140-character rebuttals of some of Baum's points. ("Dissing your boss? Whining abt story credits? Writing stories that aren't good enough to run? Seeming to dislike the mag itself? Hmmm.")

And within a few hours, we even had a parodist, laughed at by Baum himself.

I don't know if we are witnessing the birth of a new literary form, or if it's just, in Orlean's words, a "journalistic hair-pulling nude wrestling match." But it's fun.

I'm slowly warming up to Twitter. But it does have its limits. Take, for example, this fascinating feed from Dan Baum, author of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, one of the year's best books so far.

The author has posted a series of Tweets explaining why he no longer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. It's a fascinating peek behind the curtain of the most esteemed magazine in America. It's also annoying to read as a series of 140-character bursts. Serial novels? I'm down with that. Serial paragraphs? Maybe not so much.

Still, I'm pleased to see someone of Baum's stature visiting the frontiers of communication. It's a worthwhile experiment, and the details he's revealing are worth the hassle. For my money, though, if you're looking for a narrative genius to follow on Twitter, Susan Orlean is the way to go. Her combination of zingers and personal confessions has become one of my favorite feeds.

Would be interested in getting your suggestions for other writers to follow. Also wondering whether you see this as the exciting wave of the future or further evidence that our society is sliding down the Teflon-coated chute to oblivion, one mindless technological development after another.

AUSTIN - Fort Worth native Edwin "Bud" Shrake, former Dallas Morning News sports columnist, novelist and one of the state's most revered writers, died early Friday morning at St. David's Hospital from cancer. He was 77.

Best-known for his witty, observant sports prose and as co-author of Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, an inspirational golf guide and the best-selling sports book in publishing history, he was also a biographer, screenwriter, playwright and raffish correspondent with literary friends.

"Bud was a treasure," his friend, screenwriter/photographer Bill Wittliff, said. "He was one of those who took the raw material of our history and was making real literature of it. He was one of the greats with Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. We were fortunate indeed to have his voice."

Texas State University-San Marcos, which holds his archives, has this extensive biography posted.

A review of his 2008 collection, Land of The Permanent Wave, can be read here.

A review of his 2007 novel, Custer's Brother's Horse, can be found here.

-- reporting by Jane Sumner

(File photo)

The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference is offering $15,000 in prizes to narrative writers who take part in the annual gathering.
Personal essays, reporting-and-research-based narratives and book manuscripts are eligible. The best work will be published in the journal Ten Spurs, and the book manuscript winner will be offered a provisional book contract from University of North Texas Press.
Submissions must be postmarked by June 1. Workshops will be held July 24 for the top 50 article and essay submissions and the top 20 book manuscript submissions. Writers must be registered for the conference, which takes place July 24-26. Fees for workshop participants are $255 to $355.
George Getschow, the program's writer in residence, noted that the Mayborn has helped launch the careers of several new writers -- and made fans out of award-winning veterans, many of whom return year after year.
"No matter how long you've been at it, they see that there's new approaches and new thinking that they can apply in their own work," he said.
Speakers at this year's event, which is sponsored by the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism at UNT, include Paul Theroux, Ira Glass, Alma Guillermoprieto and Roy Blount Jr.

Longtime readers of Texas Pages will already be familiar with the name David LaBounty, publisher at Plano's Blue Cubicle Press. David has regularly contributed timely and insightful comments on everything from his experiences at Texas and Arkansas book festivals to the future of publishing.

I've also seen him in action at the Texas Book Festival, where he and his wife, Robin, regularly sell copies of The First Line and Workers Write!, which so far as I know are still the two finest literary journals ever to come out of Plano.

Every time we've chatted, David has offered up an interesting insight or anecdote about publishing. So I thought it was time to bring him onboard as an official contributor. Watch for posts to begin popping up soon. And if you're interested in his publications, you can find copies at these fine stores nationwide.

Texas State University at San Marcos is preparing to allow researchers access to its Cormac McCarthy collection starting May 18.

According to the school's press release, this will be the first time McCarthy's drafts and manuscripts will be seen by the public, aside from a few select pieces that were displayed in recent exhibitions.

The Wittliff Collections at the Alkek Library acquired the McCarthy archives in December 2007. It includes 100 boxes of correspondence, notes, hand-written and typed drafts, setting copies, proofs and other materials.

Perhaps the library has a battered shopping cart you can use to haul your research materials around. Just don't annoy the librarian. I don't like the way he's holding that pneumatic gun.

(File photo)

The Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History , given annually by the The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association, has been awarded to Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, by Sophie Burton and F. Todd Smith.

Texas A&M University Press proudly notes that both authors live in Dallas. Burton earned her doctorate in Latin American history from Texas Christian University; Smith is a professor of history at the University of North Texas.

Amazon is now taking orders for a new version of the Kindle, the Kindle DX. Victor Godinez has details over on the Technology Blog, where he says: "I think it's going to be a mammoth hit for two reasons: the larger display and a built-in PDF reader."

Wired got to fondle one and has posted extensive observations.

Poynter's Jim Romenesko takes a look at how the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post are subsidizing the device for subscribers.

And below, a complete story from the Associated Press.

(Getty Images photo)

Marilyn French, whose 1977 novel The Women's Room sold more than 20 million copies, died Saturday.

Gloria Steinem told The Washington Post, "In a way, The Women's Room was, to a particular part of the women's movement, what Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was to the civil rights community. She was always so far ahead because she wasn't writing about reforms around the edges. Her theories were big and exciting, and they definitely appeal to younger women who hear about them."

Obituaries are available from The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

Austin's statesman.com picks up on this NPR report about Wyoming poet and professor Craig Arnold, who is missing after taking a trip to see a Japanese volcano.

Arnold was a 2000 recipient of the Dobie Paisano fellowship. Poet Susan Briante, who teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas, has started a Facebook page to keep people updated.

From the category of "Things I Missed While I Was Away," here's news from the Western Writers of America, who honored the best in the Western with their 2009 Spur Awards.

Finalists will be honored June 16 through 20 at the WWA Convention in Oklahoma City.

A full list of winners, as provided by the WWA, follows:

LONDON (AP) -- A British auction house says it is offering Darwin fans a chance to buy a first edition of the famed naturalist's groundbreaking book.

Auctioneer Keys says the copy of "On the Origin of Species" is expected to sell on Thursday for up to 30,000 pounds ($44,600).

The 1859 work established Charles Darwin's international reputation and built the backbone of the theory of evolution.

Keys says the book is one of 1,250 printed and is expected to attract interest from around the world.

Last month's Christian Book Expo, which, as noted earlier, drew far, far fewer people than expected to Dallas last month, won't be resurrected for 2010, says Publishers Weekly.

PW says the show ended up $250,000 in the red. GalleyCat has additional analysis from Michael Hyatt, CEO of the Thomas Nelson publishing house.

I'm not sure whether to blame the economy, the marketing or the location -- there are plenty of Dallas churches with tens of thousands of presumably literate members on the rolls. Are they just not readers? Or just not the type who would pay money to listen to writers?

Any thoughts?

[UPDATE: For excellent analysis of what might have made the Expo work, don't miss Mary Demuth's commentary, which was posted as a comment here and also on her blog. Mary's latest book, Daisy Chain, was just published by Zondervan.]

The North Texas Book Festival presented its annual awards, which honor excellence in small press and self-publishing, earlier this month. Here's a list of the winners:

Memoirist David Sedaris amply proved himself the rock star of writers at Sunday night's Arts & Letters Live event at McFarlin Auditorium. A&LL folks told me McFarlin was smushed to the gills, with 2,400 tickets sold and 150 people (sad, disappointed people) still on a waiting list as the lights went down. And down. "Can it be dark?" Sedaris asked. The room stayed dimly lit. "Can it be dark?" he repeated. Rafter elves complied, and we were bathed in pitch black, Sedaris' apparently preferred ambience for his readings.

It's fun to see the kids' eyes get really big when they meet the authors and illustrators that created the books they love. And you can get that chance today at the free Dallas Children's Book Fair and Literary Festival at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library. Get all the details on the Dallas Moms blog here.

The American Booksellers Association today announced the winners of the inaugural Indies Choice Book Awards (formerly the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards). The 2009 Indies Choice Book Award winners, chosen by the owners and staff at ABA member stores during more than four weeks of voting, are:
* Best Indie Buzz Book (Fiction): The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial Press)
* Best Conversation Starter (Nonfiction): The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead)
* Best Author Discovery: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (Ecco)
* Best Indie Young Adult Buzz Book (Fiction): The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins)
* Best New Picture Book: Bats at the Library, by Brian Lies (Houghton Mifflin)
* Most Engaging Author: Sherman Alexie

Author Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), who was scheduled to appear May 1 at the University of Texas at Dallas as part of the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live series, has canceled his appearance.

Colson Whitehead is still scheduled for that date. Refunds will not be offered, but ticketholders can call 214-922-1818 for details.

From CNN.com:

Fans of the character Easy Rawlins don't want to hear it, but author Walter Mosley says he has officially moved on.

The prolific writer seemingly wrapped up his beloved series -- which spawned the 1995 film "Devil in a Blue Dress" starring Denzel Washington -- in 2007 with the 10th Easy Rawlins mystery, "Blonde Faith."

The ending saddened die-hard fans who had faithfully followed the adventures of the Los Angeles, California-based everyman-turned-private investigator whose stories played out in an era from the Jim Crow 1940s to the politically charged 1960s.

Read more.

Columbia University last month announced winners of the coveted Bancroft Prize, which is given to authors of "books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy."

The winners were Thomas G. Andrews for Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, Drew Gilpin Faust for This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and Pekka Hämäläinen for The Comanche Empire.

Southern Methodist University had a role in the Hämäläinen title. A press release notes that the book was "honed while he was a fellow" at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies in Dedman College.

The release says that Hämäläinen, now associate professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was a fellow during the 2001-2002 academic year. "Hämäläinen notes in the acknowledgment section of The Comanche Empire that the book would not exist without the counsel and encouragement of SMU's [Clements Center director David] Weber and the Clements Center manuscript workshop that brought together prominent scholars to discuss his project."

Si Dunn called the book a "fascinating and richly detailed study."

[Update: We've fixed that reference to David Weber.]

Shelf Awareness has a nice, um, scoop on the new bailout plan for the book industry. I won't recap it all here. But I do like the suggestion that:

"... President Obama, an avid reader, is launching a book club with Oprah Winfrey. Called the Double O Book Club, the joint venture will feature titles from 'distressed' publishers and be tweeted from the White House."

Any other modest proposals out there?

And happy April.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- John Hope Franklin, a revered Duke University historian and scholar of life in the South and the African-American experience in the United States, died Wednesday. He was 94.
Duke spokesman David Jarmul said Franklin died of congestive heart failure at the university's hospital in Durham.
Born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma where he was often subjected to humiliating incidents of racism, he was later instrumental in bringing down the legal and historical validations of such a world.
As an author, his book "From Slavery to Freedom" was a landmark integration of black history into American history. As a scholar, his research helped Thurgood Marshall win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the nation's public schools.
"It was evident how much the lawyers appreciated what the historians could offer," Franklin later wrote. "For me, and I suspect the same was true for the others, it was exhilarating."

The Houston Press has details on job cuts today at the Houston Chronicle.

Among the reported victims is their respected book editor, Fritz Lanham. He'd held the post since 1993, according to a bio still available at the Chronicle's site.

Overall details on the situation at the Chronicle are reported by The Associated Press.

[Update: Belated thanks to regular contributor Elizabeth Bennett for the tip.]

This weekend's Christian Book Expo in Dallas drew some big names, none bigger than atheist author Christopher Hitchens (pictured), whose debate with four leading Christian thinkers is recounted here.

Unfortunately, the expo drew far fewer people than expected. Staff Writer Sam Hodges reports on the aftermath here. Publishers Weekly also takes a look at things from an industry perspective.

If you took part, what's your take?

(Dallas Morning News photo by Rex C. Curry/Special Contributor)

Word comes today from the University of North Texas that Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism alum Michael Mooney will appear in not one but two "Best American" anthologies this year.

Mooney, a onetime Morning News contributor who works at Village Voice Media's New Times Broward-Palm Beach paper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., wrote The Day Kennedy Died for D Magazine. That piece will appear in the 2009 edition of The Best American Crime Reporting this fall. Jeffrey Toobin will be guest editor.

Mooney's Royal Flushed, meanwhile, will appear in Best American Sports Writing, edited by Leigh Montville.

Reached via e-mail, Mooney said:

NEW YORK (AP) -- "Ragtime" novelist E.L. Doctorow and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul were among the 14 finalists announced Wednesday for the Man Booker International Prize, given every two years for lifetime achievement by a fiction writer who writes in English or whose work is widely available in English translation.
The list included three Americans -- Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates and Evan. S. Connell, author of the novels "Mr. Bridge" and "Mrs. Bridge." Naipaul is a native of Trinidad who lives in England.
The prize is worth around $85,000, and the winner will be announced in May.
Also cited were Australia's Peter Carey, Mahasweta Devi of Bangladesh, Scottish author James Kelman, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Arnost Lustig of Czechoslovakia, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, Italy's Antonio Tabucchi, Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Dubravka Ugresic of Croatia and Ludmila Ulitskaya of Russia.
Previous winners of the prize, founded in 2004, are Ismail Kadare of Albania and Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.

And now, for the lighter side of the news.

We last wrote about Scott Hilburn in October, when his comic strip, "The Argyle Sweater," launched in the pages of The Dallas Morning News.

He has a new compilation out, and, as noted on his blog, you can even download a year's worth of strips to your iPhone.

And his publicist kindly sends along this video promoting his new line of greeting cards. Yeah, it's a commercial, but now you can know what a real-life comic strip artist looks and sounds like. So if you run into him in the pencil aisle at the Frisco Wal*Mart, you can say hi.

John Marshall, longtime book critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, offers a farewell column that has tidbits on all kinds of literary notables from the past decade. Among his observations:

Strangest moment: Memoirist Mary Karr ("The Liars' Club") packing as I asked questions in her hotel room. No other author folded tiny bikini undies during an interview.
Fave repeat author interviews: Richard Ford and the late David Halberstam. Frank, generous, thoughtful.
Most unexpected interview visitors: Amy Tan arriving with a mesh bag that contained her two tiny Yorkshire terriers.

Meanwhile, another class act among book reviewers, John Mark Eberhart, is reportedly a victim of cuts at The Kansas City Star.

Some of most influential and best-selling Christian authors will be at the Dallas Convention Center, and so will the best-selling atheist author Christopher Hitchens, who will take on a panel of Christian apologists (including the Rev. Jim Denison of Dallas) on Saturday afternoon. This is billed as the first ever "fan event" in Christian publishing, as opposed to trade shows aimed at booksellers. Click here for the Expo Web site.

Observed in Publishers Weekly: Bookstore sales in January were flat, compared with an 8.3 percent decline in overall retail sales.

Do you think people are rushing to books as a cheap source of entertainment in troubled times? (One bookseller recently told me he was emphasizing the value of a $20 book, which might provide a week's worth of enjoyment, vs. $20 for a night at the movies (with popcorn and a drink), which lasts 2 hours.)

Are YOU turning to books to get you through troubled times?

Or is this just one of those business-statistic blips that will, in the long run, prove meaningless as we spiral toward our inevitable, impoverished, ignorant doom?

Here's the list of NBCC winners, with links to a couple of reviews.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Stories and scholarship from around the world were honored by book critics Thursday night, including works about the ancient and modern Middle East and a novel set in Mexico, the late Roberto Bolano's 2666.
The National Book Critics Circle awarded the fiction prize to Bolano, the Chilean author who died in 2003; the award for general nonfiction to The Forever War, Dexter Filkins' reporting on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the autobiography prize to Ariel Sabar's My Father's Paradise, which traces the author's Jewish roots in Kurdish Iraq.
Sabar, who spoke of being an immigrant son's in 1980s Los Angeles, remembered growing up with a father who "looked funny," "talked funny" and "couldn't get his clothes to match." But he became deeply curious about his family's history and was struck by Iraq's long history of people of different faiths "who pretty much got along."
Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, a native of Trinidad who now lives in England, was the subject of the biography winner, Patrick French's The World Is What It Is. Seth Lerer's Children's Literature, which traces young people's stories as far back as ancient Greece and Aesop's fables, was cited for criticism.
Lerer, noting his subject matter, thought it fitting to bring up an old cliche and "thank all the little people."
For the first time in the awards' history, two winners were named for one category: August Kleinzahler's Sleeping It Off in Rapid City and Juan Felipe Herrera's Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems shared the poetry prize.
The awards carry a great deal of prestige but no cash, fitting for a time when reviewers have struggled to hold on to their jobs and many members of the critics circle's board are freelancers.

The National Book Critics Circle is gathering this evening to announce its winners. Their blog, Critical Mass, has been taking extensive looks at all the finalists.

As spotted on Frontburner, local agent Jan Miller Rich is the broker behind a reported multimillion-dollar deal for Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, which crashed into the Hudson River.

The news was first reported by Sara Nelson on The Daily Beast, who explains how publishing world math works:

The crazy part is that the Sullenberger deal was for two books. The first will be a memoir, and the second is a collection of Sully's inspirational poems. ... This is the kind of book deal a publisher makes in order both to make a balance sheet work--the $3.2 million goes down on two different lines, for two different titles, and thus each book "only" has to earn back half of the total--and also to humor a would-be author or, in this case, poet. (And make no mistake, if William Morrow had not signed up the second book, many other publishers would have, just to get Sully's memoir.)

A little background about the agent -- a genuine Highland Park mover and shaker (she and husband Jeff just feted Robert Wagner at their home), her clients include Dr. Phil McGraw, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Catherine Crier. (She was also in the news in 2005 for opening her home to Hurricane Katrina victims.)

Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants, has postponed her appearance on June 15 at the Dallas Museum of Arts' Arts & Letters Live series. According to her publicist, Gruen's new book publication has been delayed and she has postponed all appearances for the time being. When she goes back on tour, though, we're assured that Dallas will be on her agenda.

Replacing Gruen will be author John Burnham Schwartz, critically aclaimed author of Bicycle Days, Claire Marvel and Reservation Road (which was made into a film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Connelly). His latest novel, The Commoner, looks into the isolated lives of women within the Japanese royal family.

Those who already have tickets for the Sara Gruen appearance have several options: to exchange them for John Burnham Schwartz's appearance; to exchange them for another A&LL program of equivalent value; or to return the tickets for a credit voucher for whenever Gruen is rescheduled. Those with tickets should call 214-922-1818, or e-mail their choice to artsandletterslive@DallasMuseumofArt.org, by May 30. For more information about Burnham, go here, and to purchase tickets go here.

British novelist Ian McEwan wowed an Arts & Letters Live audience of about 750 people Friday night at the Naomi Bruton Theatre in the Dallas Convention Center. McEwan is one of the rare authors who is as entertaining live as he is in his writing; he's the epitome of the phrase "dry wit."

The Booker Prize winner (for Amsterdam) talked mostly about the weaving of fact into fiction, and how he frequently receives letters from readers pointing out something they perceive as an error, but that he, as a writer of fiction, sees as merely his authorial prerogative. He talked about both his own writing and others, telling a particularly funny story about a detail in Lord of the Flies about which many readers corrected author William Golding. Golding's response: "Tough."

McEwan also did a reading from and gave some tantalyzing hints into the plot of his next book, which revolves around the issue of global climate change. He recognizes up front the difficulty of the subject: "It's stuffed with facts, it affects too many people, and nobody's for it."

I think it's fair to say McEwan made everyone who was there Friday night feel smarter just for having been in the room with him.

There are many more goodies yet to come in the A&LL series from the Dallas Museum of Art. Next up is "Mummies, Magic and Mayhem," an evening of readings and discussion centered around the DMA's exhibit "Tutankhamum and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs," on March 20. For information on that and other upcoming A&LL events, go here.

PHOTO by Joy Tipping: Ian McEwan signed fans' books for about 45 minutes following his talk on Friday at the Naomi Bruton Theatre.

Due to Facebook's new Terms of Service, our profile got bumped, so you may have noticed that we're not friends anymore. But good news: We really miss you guys and we're back in the form of a Facebook Page. So follow this link and become a fan to continue getting updates and news from GuideLive.com.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Tobias Wolff, best known for his memoir "This Boy's Life," has been awarded a $20,000 prize for excellence in short story writing.
Wolff won the Story Prize on Wednesday for the collection "Our Story Begins." The finalists -- Jhumpa Lahiri, for "Unaccustomed Earth," and Joe Meno for "Demons in the Spring" -- each received $5,000.
The Story Prize was founded in 2004; previous winners include Mary Gordon and Edwidge Danticat.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The longtime head of the book publishers' trade association is stepping down.
Former Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado, who has served for 12 years as president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, says it's time for her "to move on."
She will be replaced in May by former Rep. Tom Allen of Maine.
Schroeder's departure comes at a particularly critical time for publishers, who have been laying off employees, freezing salaries and offering lower advances for books in response to a harsh economy.
The industry is also in the midst of a historic transition with the rise of online bookselling and publishing, and a small, but quickly expanding market for electronic texts.

Joe Nick Patoski has just been announced as winner of the TCU Texas Book Award for Willie Nelson: An Epic Life.

The award, sponsored by the TCU Press and Friends of the TCU Library, is given biennially to the author of the best book about Texas. It joins such esteemed winners as Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl and Stephen Harrigan's Gates of the Alamo.

The award will be presented 6:30 p.m. March 19 at the Kelly Center on the TCU campus. Tickets are $30; call 817-257-6109.

Red bandanna is optional, I am sure.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland," an acclaimed post-Sept. 11 novel bypassed for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle prize, has finally received a literary honor: the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
The choice was announced Thursday by Susan Richards Shreve and Robert Stone, directors of the Washington-based PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
O'Neill, whose book is narrated by a man who lived in downtown Manhattan at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks, will receive $15,000. The finalists -- Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," Susan Choi's "A Person of Interest," Richard Price's "Lush Life" and Ron Rash's "Serena" -- each get $5,000.
Previous winners include Philip Roth, John Updike and E.L. Doctorow.

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert utterly enchanted a crowd of more than 1,200 Tuesday night at Richardson's Eisemann Center, in an appearance that was part of this season's (a killer season, I might add) of the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live series. Gilbert is as amusing and engaging in person as she is as a writer, and she has, as A&LL director Carolyn Bess noted, "the wit and timing of a stand-up" comic.

The story that grabbed the most laughter -- along with some horrified gasps -- was when she told of how, on a previous trip through Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, on the way to and from somewhere else, her Brazilian boyfriend José (readers know him as Felipe in Eat, Pray, Love) was detained and interrogated for six hours by the Department of Homeland Security.

Of course, the library is the very cheapest way to get books, but modern marketing also offers other inexpensive alternatives for those who like to accumulate (or just read) books. There's even one service that features Netflix-like book loans.

Travel to Oprah Winfrey's Web site to see four choices for cheaper books. And they don't even mention buying used books from eBay, Alibris or half.com via the Internet.

NEW YORK (AP) -- An early, long-unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien is coming out.
"The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun," a thorough reworking in verse of old Norse epics that predates Tolkien's writing of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, will be published in May by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
According to Houghton, the book will include an introduction by Tolkien and notes by his son, Christopher Tolkien.
J.R.R. Tolkien, whose fantasy novels have sold millions of copies, died in 1973. "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun" was written in the 1920s and '30s, when the author was teaching at Oxford University.

(Additional details about the book's genesis in the author's days as a professor at Oxford are available at Publishers Weekly.)

Our friends at Plano's Blue Cubicle Press say that
Overtime, their series of one-story chapbooks about the workplace, is going quarterly.

They want stories between 5,000 - 12,000 words where work is a central theme. They pay between $25 and $50, depending on length and rights acquired.

Pay for writing? Wow, what a concept. I hope that catches on.

Send stories to overtime@workerswritejournal.com or:

Overtime
Blue Cubicle Press
P.O. Box 250382
Plano, TX 75025-0382

For more information visit www.workerswritejournal.com/overtime.htm.

Not a writer? Hey, they need subscribers too.

Dallas Morning News staff writers Stella Chávez and Dianne Solís took in appearances this weekend in Denton from Guillermo Arriaga, one of Mexico's gifted story-tellers and a lover of books. Here's their report:


Guillermo Arriaga is best known for writing the cinematic trilogy Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel. And he'll be back in Dallas for the American Film Institute's third annual international cinema festival, March 26 through April 2. That's when he'll show his director and writing chops via The Burning Plain, a mother-daughter tale of love and redemption that features Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron.

But it's books, rather than films, that really move Arriaga's heart. And he's written a few: A Sweet Scent of Death, The Night Buffalo and a collection of short stories titled Retorno 201.

Books, he says, are the most perfect object because of their portability and ability to transport the imagination and shape thinking, he told those gathered at his lectures at the University of North Texas.

When we lose the capability of reading, we lose our inner life, our ability to take it slower and ponder the meaning of a good story, says the Mexico City native.

The New York Times continues its series, "The Future of Reading," with a story about librarians, specifically librarians in schools.

It seems that librarians are underappreciated in a big way. While other teachers (and yes, they should be defined as teachers) may or may not incorporate technology in what they do, librarians must adapt to new technology. The Times goes into detail on what presenting technology to kids entails. Suffice to say that there is a considerable challenge in adapting to a world where kids stare blankly at you when you ask if they've considered consulting a book as part of the research for a report.

Libraries are alive, but maybe not as well as they should be today, considering the bad economic times. After all, what's cheaper than free entertainment available to all?

One more tidbit of news ahead of James McPherson's previously discussed appearance today in Dallas.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Two authors of books on Abraham Lincoln's military leadership have been named winners of the Lincoln Prize and will share the $50,000 cash award, organizers announced Thursday, the 200th anniversary of the president's birth.
James McPherson, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War history, The Battle Cry of Freedom, was cited for Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. The other winner was Craig L. Symonds for Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War.
The award, given for outstanding Civil War scholarship, was founded in 1990 by businessmen-philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman.
Previous winners include Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kenneth Burns and McPherson, in 1998, for For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.

(You can read more about Tried by War and Lincoln and His Admirals in this review.)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Amazon.com Inc. is releasing a new, slimmer version of the Kindle, its electronic reading device, and it will have an exclusive release of a new book from Stephen King.
The online retailer's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, told a New York news conference today that the highly anticipated new Kindle will cost $359, same as the previous version. Amazon says it will begin shipping the new Kindle Feb. 24.
The new Kindle is about one-third of an inch thick and weighs 10 ounces. It includes a screen with 16 shades of gray, compared with the previous Kindle's four shades. It will be able to read text aloud and can store 1,500 books, compared to 200 on the previous version. It also promises two weeks of reading on one charge of the battery.
King has written a novella, called "Ur," that will be exclusively available on the Kindle and will incorporate the device into the story.
King has been known as a digital publishing innovator. In 2000 he released a novella, "Riding the Bullet," as a free download. Web sites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com were swamped by high demand for the 66-page story.

NEW YORK (AP) -- A "deeply personal memoir" by Patrick Swayze and his wife is coming out this fall.

"The currently untitled book will offer an intimate account of Patrick Swayze's childhood, career and marriage, as well as his brave fight against a diagnosis of stage-four pancreatic cancer, from which he has gleaned wisdom and has remained resolutely optimistic," according to a statement released Thursday by Atria Books.

Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer have a lot in common: a thing for the semi-dead, rabid fans who would gnaw a limb off (yours or theirs) to get to their latest material, enough cash in the bank to buy every ousted bank president in America two or three gold-plated toilets.

But although it appears safe to engage him in a discussion about Hogwarts, don't look for any "Edward Cullen is my Valentine" flair on King's Facebook page. On the USA Weekend Who's News blog, he evaluates his literary descendants, saying: "Both Rowling and Meyer, they're speaking directly to young people. ... The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good."

She's not the only one in his critical crosshairs, although Mr. Macabre is liberal with praise for others:

"Somebody who's a terrific writer who's been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult," he says. "You've got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he's just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he's very very successful."

King is promoting Stephen King Goes to the Movies. This should generate plenty of attention. But you'd think that the author of Carrie would be more careful about incurring the wrath of an army of teenage girls with a thing for the paranormal.

(Props to GalleyCat.)

(File photo/AP)

According to The New York Times, Warren Buffett has canceled an annual dinner that featured his biographer, Dallas native Alice Schroeder.

Ms. Schroeder, who wrote the wildly successful The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, has hosted a yearly dinner, where she would question Buffett in front of several hundred people.

That event will not take place, the Times says, because "those who are aware of Mr. Buffett's reaction to the book said that seeing his complicated personal life laid out in black and white left him with mixed feelings, particularly over the portrayal of his late wife, Susan."

Ms. Schroeder told the Times: ""We're still in touch with each other. But now that the book is finished, it is not as frequent as before. You can conjecture what you want from that. I will not stop the conjecture."

In an October interview with The Dallas Morning News, Schroeder said the two had remained "on perfectly good terms." She notes that in the course of writing the book, Buffett gave her free rein -- and told her that if his recollection varied from someone else's, she was to use the version that was less flattering of him. And she took him at his word.

"I had to come to a place in my mind where I was willing for him to not just dislike what I wrote but to hate it so much that he would never speak to me again," Ms. Schroeder said. "Once I made peace with that, I felt liberated to write."

Asked for a response to the Times story, Buffett's spokeswoman noted a statement that appeared in The Omaha World-Herald, which first reported the news. "At some point, like the charity golf outing he once hosted, an event runs its course."

(Spotted on Shelf Awareness.)

Scholarly publishing takes the spotlight at a Texas A&M conference next week.

The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication In the Digital Age is being billed as the "first-ever, institution-wide conversation on scholarly publishing ― focusing on university presses, libraries, scholarly journals, individual researchers, tenure and promotion committees, intellectual property managers and other institutional stakeholders."

The conference takes place Feb. 11-13 at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center.

It's free.

A full list of speakers is available here. You can register here. Texas A&M University Press is a co-sponsor and provided details of the event.

You have until no later than Feb. 8 to get your manuscript to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. (That deadline may be be optimistic -- only 10,000 submissions are actually being accepted.)

The winner gets $25,000 and a publishing contract. Last year's winner was New Orleans bartender Bill Loehfelm, for Fresh Kills.

And if you want to know the inside story on how these things work, check out this essay from a former contest judge, via GalleyCat.

Following up on Chris Tucker's comments from last week, here are a few more thoughts about John Updike:

At The Daily Beast, regular Dallas Morning News contributor John Freeman writes an overview of Updike's career:

"Nothing, it seemed, fell outside of his purview. In addition to his steady stream of short stories, novels and poems, he wrote essays on baseball, the value of a penny, presidents, and train travel. He brought back dispatches from Helsinki and Anguilla, lectured in Brazil and Africa and folded those observations into two surprising novels."

Granta magazine, of which Freeman is U.S. editor, has an excellent tribute site, with this from author Joseph O'Neill:

"Updike, the author, has been with us for a fatherly half-century, taking an interest in our affairs with a fatherly steadfastedness and love. Even octogenarians will barely remember what it was like to live maturely in a world unrefreshed by Updikean scrutiny. Now who will bear witness to us?"

Elsewhere, The New York Times has a tribute from Charles McGrath. And we still welcome your own comments.

(Photo: Knopf, via Reuters)

Here's a sneak peek at what you'll find in Sunday's paper and on GuideLive.com.

OK, the economy may be crumbling, but it's a good week to be someone who builds things, at least in this publication. We'll have a look at three architecture-related books:
I.M. Pei: Complete Works, by Philip Jodidio and Janet Adams Strong; David M. Schwarz Architects 2002-2007, by Robert L. Miller; and On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, by Ada Louise Huxtable.

(As you may know, Pei and Schwarz both are extensively represented in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Staff critic Scott Cantrell puts their achievements in context.)

Also on the books pages:

Bordeaux: A Novel in Four Vintages, by Paul Torday;
Lark and Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips (fans will appreciate this interview with her.);
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed;
The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

To reiterate what Ann Pinson said, Wally Lamb was just marvelous last night at First Presbyterian Church. He was there as part of the Dallas Museum of Art's fabulous 2009 lineup for its Arts & Letters Live Series. What a boon for book lovers in this town -- if you haven't seen this year's schedule -- Ian McEwan! Elizabeth Gilbert! David Sedaris! -- you owe it to yourself to check it out, and reserve your tix early. More than 450 fans turned out to see Lamb.

I was so impresed with Lamb's humility, warmth and intelligence -- a combination that is all too rarely seen among authors with his kind of numbers (he is, after all, one of the few authors to make the Oprah book club twice). Last night, he read from an autobiographical essay and then read a very moving piece from his new book, The Hour I First Believed. I was fascinated with how he "hears" his characters; he said the first line that Caelum, the new book's protagonist, spoke to him was: "My mother was a convicted felon, a manic-depressive, and Miss Rheingold Beer of 1950." From that, the book was born.

Also loved his stories about some of the reader mail he receives, like the letter where someone asked him if there was going to be an all-woman Mt. Rushmore, who would he put there? I think we all expected him to say Oprah. But no: "The only one I'm absolutely sure of is Aretha Franklin." On that, Wally, we're totally with you.

Click to see our review of the new book, and our recent interview with Lamb.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Tom Clancy is going digital.

The author of such blockbusters as "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger" is finally making his work available electronically, starting Feb. 3 with his breakthrough novel, "The Hunt for Red October."

Publisher Penguin Group (USA) Inc. made the announcement Thursday.

Clancy's books will be available in all e-formats.

Executives Laura Porco of Amazon.com and Chris Smith of Sony Reader said Thursday that Clancy had been in great demand by customers.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- The boyhood home of Pulitzer-winning author Cormac McCarthy, long abandoned and overgrown, has been destroyed by a fire even as preservationists tried in recent months to save it.
"We have lost a literary landmark," Kim Trent, executive director of the nonprofit Knox Heritage group, said Wednesday, a day after the two-story wood-frame structure was reduced to a smoldering ruin.
It was a blow for a city that also failed to save the early homes of Pulitzer-winning writer James Agee and poet Nikki Giovanni.

An e-mail from Random House announces that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer.

[UPDATE: Here is the initial report from The Associated Press.]

NEW YORK (AP) -- John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir "Self-Consciousness" and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.
An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Neil Gaiman has received the top prize for children's literature: The John Newbery Medal.
The Graveyard Book, about a boy raised by vampire, a werewolf and a witch, was named the winner Monday of the 88th annual Newbery. The Randolph Caldecott Medal, given to the illustrator of the best picture book, went to Beth Krommes for "The House in the Night," written by Susan Marie Swanson.
The Coretta Scott King Award for best author was given to Kadir Nelson, for "We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball." The illustrator award went to Floyd Cooper for "The Blacker the Berry."

Click below for the entire list of winners, as provided by the American Library Association.

[UPDATE: Here's a fresh story, including comments from Mr. Gaiman.]

The NBCC came out with its list of finalists for its annual awards, which is perhaps most notable for the titles that did not make the cut.

Hillel Italie's report is below. If you're obsessive, you can also go straight to the NBCC, or read reports from The New York Times or Bloomberg -- with more to come, I'm sure. (We also welcome your thoughts -- did the critics get the list right?)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Presidential favorite Marilynne Robinson, the late Roberto Bolano of Chile and a memoir about Africa featured last year at Starbucks were among the finalists announced Saturday for the National Book Critics Circle prizes.
Others nominated in six competitive categories included Annette Gordon-Reed's "The Hemingses of Monticello," winner of the National Book Award last fall; Patrick French's "The World is What It Is," an explicit and authorized biography of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul; and Steve Coll's biography "The Bin Ladens."
Winners will be announced March 12. There are no cash awards.

NEW YORK (AP) -- A representative for Patrick Swayze says the cancer-stricken actor plans to write a memoir and his wife, Lisa, will collaborate with him on the book.
Publicist Jayme Phillips says plans for the book are "extremely premature."
Says Phillips: "There's no publisher. There's no dates. There's no anything else."
Swayze, who has battled pancreatic cancer for the last year, spent a week in the hospital earlier this month after contracting pneumonia.
The 56-year-old actor stars in the new A&E drama "The Beast."

Last week, we took a look at now-citizen George W. Bush's reading habits.

Today, we can discuss President Barack Obama's tastes, thanks to The New York Times.

Here's the nut of the analysis:

"Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading -- ruminating upon writers' ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry. ...

"What's more, Mr. Obama's love of fiction and poetry -- Shakespeare's plays, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln's collected writings and Emerson's Self Reliance -- has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush."

I was pleased to see a couple of my favorite histories (Team of Rivals, Parting the Waters) on his list. What did you think? Any suggestions for the new president's nightstand?

Victor Godinez interviewed Brian Ashcraft, the former Dallasite who write Arcade Mania: The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers. We have the story today on Guidelive.com. And below, we have a longer version of their exchange.

Beatriz Terrazas sends in sad news about Greg Coln, river guide and author of the self-published Tracks on the River, A River Outfitter's Perspective of Life on the Rio Grande Headwaters.

She notes:

In 2005, readers of The Dallas Morning News became acquainted with Mr. Coln, owner and operator of Mountain Man Tours river outfitters in Creede, Colo. At that time, the paper published a series of stories about the Rio Grande titled Call of the River. Greg probably knew the Rio Grande headwaters in the San Juan Mountains better than anyone, and he generously shared his time and expertise with me and photographer Erich Schlegel. Besides rafting visitors down the river, he was Mineral County's Search and Rescue, and numerous people owe their lives to his expertise on the water. Greg lost his own life to a battle with cancer on January 7. He will be missed.

Friends and family compiled this tribute.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Chris Rock is making a comeback, as an author.
Grand Central Publishing says Rock's new book -- not yet titled -- will be full of "comedic observations." It's tentatively scheduled for release next year.
His "Rock This!" was published in 1997.
Deb Futter, vice president and editor-in-chief of hardcovers at Grand Central Publishing, said in a statement Tuesday: "We are so excited to be publishing Chris Rock, especially because he hasn't published a book in many years so this one will be highly anticipated."
Rock, 43, was a featured voice in the "Bee Movie" and "Madagascar" films, and he created the "Everybody Hates Chris" TV series.
Rock will have good comic company at Grand Central, which also publishes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

(Photo of Chris Rock / Associated Press)

Following on that earlier post, here's a take on those NEA numbers from Hillel Italie of The Associated Press.

Others with interesting takes include the Los Angeles Times and Gawker.

We have space for your comments as well, should you care to weigh in.

NEW YORK (AP) -- "Reading on the rise" declares a new government study, which reports a surprising and welcome increase in the number of adults who recently read a novel, short story, play or other work of literature.
But the study also suggests that not every person who reads necessarily wants to.
According to "Reading on the Rise," being issued Monday by the National Endowment for the Arts, just over half of the people surveyed 18 or older read some kind of literature in 2008, up from 46.7 percent in 2002, when the number had dropped by seven percentage points over the previous decade. NEA chairman Dana Gioia called the results "astonishing" and an "important new cultural trend."

Monday morning is not the usual time slot for good news, but a National Endowment for the Arts study in today's New York Times indicates that for the first time since 1982, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

The story says:

"The proportion of adults reading some kind of so-called literary work -- just over half -- is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992, and the proportion of adults reading poetry and drama continued to decline. Nevertheless the proportion of overall literary reading increased among virtually all age groups, ethnic and demographic categories since 2002. It increased most dramatically among 18-to-24-year-olds, who had previously shown the most significant declines."

NEA chairman Dana Gioia credits community-based programs such as the "Big Read," Oprah Winfrey's book club, and megaseries such as "Harry Potter" and "Twilight."

Because I promised good news, I will not dwell upon the paragraph deep in the story that notes how the proportion of adults who said they had read any kind of a book, fiction or nonfiction, that was not required for work or school actually declined slightly.

The full study is posted here.

(Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the tip.)

From The Christian Science Monitor:

And now, a spot of good book news among the bleak: 2009 will see the return of Winnie the Pooh. The estate of A.A. Milne has authorized a sequel to the original Pooh books and A.P. Dutton Children's Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, will publish "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" on Oct. 5.

Read more.

I wrote earlier about the Pulpwood Queens' upcoming bash, but founder Kathy Patrick writes that this year's celebration will be tempered by the passing of her friend, Fred McKenzie, who owned Books on the Bayou in Jefferson, Texas. He died Jan. 1 and was 90 years old.

She wrote me that he "was not just any bookseller, this was a man who ... lived life to its fullest. I have never in all my book years met a man more passionate about the written word."

In a note to her book club, she went on: "What I loved about Fred more than anything was his zest for life. He never walked, he ran. He rode his bicycle fast, his little red truck even faster, and Lord knows what all he did when he flew his plane. You could not help but smile when you saw Fred and I at this moment cannot imagine my life without my little book buddy."

Kathy sends along the link to the Longview News-Journal obituary here.