Weekly Round-up With Upcoming Events

Jaycee Dugard's memoir, A Stolen Life, topped Amazon's bestseller list on Monday, July 11. The memoir was officially released a day later. Jaycee was kidnapped by Phillip Craig Garrido and his wife Nancy in 1991. A Stolen Life conveys Dugard's personal story about her eighteen-year imprisonment.

Forensic psychiatrist and Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow acquired rights to write a book about the Casey Anthony case. Casey Anthony was recently acquitted by a jury in Florida.

USA Today expands its coverage of books by launching a new Web site (books.usatoday.com).

Google will not allow an ex-employee, Paul Adams, to release his book, Social Circles. Adams left Google in January 2011 to join Facebook.

A couple weekly round-ups have followed the arrest of Bahraini poet and student Ayat Al-Gormezi. Ayat al-Gormezi was released from prison and placed under house arrest on July 13. She had been arrested in March for reading poetry at a pro-democracy rally in Pearl Square. Authorities released Ayat under the condition that she sign a paper saying she would stay at home, would not join protests,and would not speak to the media.

The final Harry Potter film is released in the United States today: Time Magazine provides insight on how fans keep the series alive by writing fan fiction.

Book Signings and an Open Door Reading

Jael McHenry: The Kitchen Daughter
One More Page Books
2200 N. Westmoreland St., #101
Arlington , VA 22213
Saturday, July 16, 2:00 p.m.

Join food and cooking blogger Jael McHenry as she discusses her first novel The Kitchen Daughter. A book signing will follow.

Maya Soetoro-Ng: Ladder To The Moon
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington , DC 200008
Saturday, July 16 , 1 p.m

Maya Soetoro-Ng, the sister of President Barack Obama discusses her new children's book, Ladder To The Moon. The book is illustrated by Yuyi Morales. A book signing will follow.

Open Door Reading: Elisavietta Ritchie, Ellen Aronofsky Cole, and Kimberly Becker
The Writer's Center
4508 Walsh Street
Bethesda, MD 20815
Sunday, July 17, 2 p.m.

The Writer’s Center presents three poets with recent collections: Elisavietta Ritchie (Cormorant Beyond the Compost), Ellen Aronofsky Cole (Prognosis), and Kimberly Becker (Words Facing East).

Have a great weekend!

A Weekly Round-up with Upcoming Events

We'll combine upcoming area events in the D.C metropolitan area with the weekly roundup this week, and it'll post a day early to make room for a special book giveaway tomorrow. Much of the literary news featured on this blog is on our Twitter feed.

Over the holiday weekend, Amazon announced plans to buy The Book Depository, a bookselling competitor in the United Kingdom and Australia.

It turns out the late writer Flannery O’Connor was also a cartoonist. A book containing her cartoons will be published later this year. The cartoons are taken from her time in high school and as an undergraduate at Georgia State. According to her biographer, Brad Gooch, O’Connor considered a career as a cartoonist. She tried submitting cartoons to The New Yorker, but received rejection slips.

Writer John D MacDonald wrote a satirical rejection letter to magazine editors who wanted to publish his work. He received many rejections throughout his career.

J.B Dickey, the owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, refuses to stock books from Amazon's Thomas and Mercer mystery imprint.

On Wednesday, June 6, HarperCollins Children’s Books teamed up with Barnes and Noble’s Nook Bookstore and the Apple iBookstore to launch a digital “I Can Read Series.”

The Millions provides a list of the sixty-six most anticipated books in the second half of 2011.


Upcoming Events: Book Signings, Open Door Readings, and Poetry Series events

David J. Solove: Nothing To Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008
Saturday, July 9, 6 pm

David J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, signs and discusses his new book, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security. This event is free and open to the public.

Open Door Reading Series
The Writer's Center
Sunday, July 10th , 2 pm

Here at The Writer's Center, Joan Dye Gussow reads from her book Growing Older: The Chronicle of Death, Life , and Vegetables. She is joined by poet W. Perry Epes, who reads from his collection, Nothing Happened. This event is free and open to the public.

The Iota Poetry Series
Iota Club and Cafe
2832 Wilson Blvd
Arlington, VA 22201
Sunday, July 10th , 6 pm

This monthly poetry series includes readings from the anthology of poems inspired by Alfred Hitchcock. Readers include Christopher Conlon, Lyn Lifshin, Miles David Moore, Norman Prentiss, and Anne Harding Woodworth. This event is free and open to the public.

Weekly Round-Up: Publishing News From Around The Internet

Here's some interesting literary news from around the internet this week. You can also find similar literary news on our twitter feed:

Last week, we reported that security forces allegedly detained a Syrian American woman, Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, for her blog entitled “A Gay Girl in Damascus”. However, this blog is a hoax. On Sunday June 12, 40–year-old Tom MacMaster confessed that he started and maintained the blog since February 2011. MacMaster lives in Scotland, but wrote his apology in Istanbul, Turkey. In his apology MacMaster explains that he never expected the blog to receive such a high level of attention. He writes that “while the narrative voice may be fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation” in the Middle East. MacMaster is a Middle East Activist pursuing a Master's Degree at the University of Edinburgh. Many supporters of the Amina persona responded to MacMaster’s apology negatively. In particular, the Syrian gay community did not accept his apology. The blog was traced to MacMaster through IP email messages supposedly from Amina to the blog from Edinburgh University. On a similar note, investigators found pictures on MacMaster’s private email. Those pictures revealed a woman who looked identical to Amina on the blog. MacMaster’s wife took the pictures on a 2008 trip to Syria.

Meanwhile in the "real world", a young student poet from Bahrain, Ayat Al-Gormezi was sentenced to one year in prison on Monday June 13. A couple weeks ago, we discussed on the weekly round-up how Ayat was imprisoned in March 20, 2011 for reading a poem at a pro-democracy rally in Pearl Square. Her trial began on June 2, 2011 on charges on anti-state claims against the Bahraini King. The Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of PEN International is protesting this sentence and asking for the poet’s unconditional and immediate release. In their petition, WiPC explains how Ayat’s trial did not comply with international standards of fairness. Her family has reported that Ayat was hospitalized for severe mistreatment in the prison, but her treatment has improved a bit due to the international attention of Ayat’s situation. WiPC plans to send their petition to the Bahraini king, the Minster of Justice and Islamic Affairs, and the Embassy of the Kingdom of Bahrain in Washington D.C.

Monday June 13 marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s second novel, American Psycho. Ellis wrote the novel at age 26. In the past twenty years, American Psycho has sold more than a million copies in the United States, has been published internationally, and has been developed into a movie. Last year the novel was sold by Vintage in an e-book format. It’s currently being developed into a Broadway play. In an interview, Ellis states “as I get older and the book moves further away from me, I can put it into perspective. It seems to me to be an extremely autobiographical novel in a lot of ways despite being about a supposed psychopath.”

Students accused Phillip Baker, a medical school dean at the University of Alberta, of plagiarizing a speech by The New Yorker writer and Harvard University Professor Atul Gawande for University of Alberta’s commencement ceremony on Friday June 10. Gawande wrote the speech Stanford University’s 2010 commencement ceremony and published the speech in The New Yorker. Baker admitted that the theme and a substantial amount of the content were similar to Gawande’s speech in his apology to the students on Sunday June 12.

The National Archives have hired its first “Wikipedian in Residence,” Dominic McDevitt-Parks on Wednesday June 15. McDevitt-Parks is a graduate student in history and archives management at Simmons College in Boston. The “Wikipedian in Residence” is part of an international movement to connect Wikipedia to museums and archives. Archivists have previously served as a “Wikipedian in Residence” in the British Museum, the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, and the Archives of American Art in Washington DC.

The Guardian lists one hundred of the best non-fiction books. Many of the books reside in the British Museum Reading Room. Books on the list include The Diary of Anne Frank, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Thursday June 16 marked Bloomsday, an annual literary celebration of author James Joyce and his novel Ulysses. Specifically, the literary world remembers Leopold Bloom’s fictional journey across Dublin in Ulysses.

Have a great weekend!

Weekly Round-up: Publishing News Around The Internet

On Fridays for the duration of the summer, thanks to my new summer intern, Rebecca Shaw, a student at Bryn Mawr, we will post helpful literary news from around the net (with links!). Much of this is stuff we post on our Twitter feed.

The annual publishing conference BookExpo America (BEA) occurred from Monday May 23, 2011 to Thursday May 26, 2011. National Public Radio reports the success of digital products launched in the past couple years. Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook were seen as prominent players in the e-market. However, publishers critiqued Apple’s iPad. Publishers noted that e-books are not available on iTunes and that while the Kindle and Nook are dedicated to reading, the I-Pad contains an abundance of additional applications.

Australian secondhand bookseller and left-wing activist, Bob Gould, died Sunday May 22. During his lifetime, Bob Gould opened twelve bookstores in Australia. He opened his first bookshop, the Third World Bookshop, in 1967. Police raided his store for selling books like Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In addition to his bookshops, Gould was a founder of the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia.

Fiction author Maureen Johnson auctioned off a full critique of an inspiring writer’s work to raise money for disaster relief after the Joplin, Missouri tornadoes on Monday, May 23. The proceeds of the auction will go to Shelterbox, an international charity that delivers emergency shelter and supplies to people affected by natural disasters.

The Audio Publisher’s Association held its 16th annual Audies Gala in New York City on Tuesday, May 24. Keith Richard’s autobiography, Life, won the Audiobook of the Year Award since it introduced audiences to the new audio-book format.

To commemorate the end of the Oprah Winfrey Show’s 25-year run, The Nielsen Company compiled a top ten list of books from Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club over the past decade. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth topped the list with 3.3 million copies sold.

The former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group, (TWBG) Larry Kirshbaum, was named publisher of the Amazon Publisher Group’s New York office. During Kirshbaum’s career at TWBG until 2005, he was regarded as an innovator and top marketer in genre fiction. As publisher of the Amazon Publisher’s Group, Kirshbaum plans to expand the Amazon Publisher Group by acquiring top quality books in both commercial and literary fiction as well as business and general non-fiction.

A Digital Entertainment survey reveals that one out of every three people who download e-books on digital readers do so illegally. The implications of this survey threaten future lawsuits, since publishing companies lose a substantial amount of revenue due to the e-book piracy. A Guardian article compares e-book piracy to the 2000 Napster lawsuit, in which music record labels lost millions of dollars. Publishers and authors will be forced to sue if people continue downloading books without paying for them.

Biographer James Dempsey discovered an unpublished E.E Cummings poem while working on a biography of publisher Scofield Thayer. He found the poem in papers relating to Thayer’s magazine, The Dial. Evidence suggests that this poem was sent around 1916, at the start of E.E Cummings career.