©2011 Simon & Schuster.

Stephen King set his fandom abuzz earlier this month with the announcement that his new novel 11/22/63 will be released on November 8th. The plot of the 1,000 page epic follows Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, through a portal in his friend Al’s storeroom into the year 1958. Al sends Jake on a mission to change history by preventing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As he settles into a culture of sock hops and Elvis under the name George Amberson, he falls for Sadie Dunhill, a lovely librarian, and encounters disturbed loner Lee Harvey Oswald. The premise of time travel in a novel is not new, but some fans question whether or not King can approach this device in an interesting, yet believable, way. “Time travel, though – even when it’s done brilliantly by Kim Stanley Robinson in Galileo’s Dream, even when it’s done humorously by Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates – sends me a bit mad. It Just Doesn’t Add Up and it messes with my mind,” writes Alison Flood in a post for The Guardian‘s Blog. Read more…

By Sarah Vowell
Riverhead Hardcover | 256pgs
Release Date: March 22, 2011

Summary:
Bestselling author and popular NPR contributor, Sarah Vowell, studies the history of Hawai’i during the 19th century in her new book Unfamiliar Fishes. The arrival of priggish New England missionaries in 1820 sets off a series of events that leads to eventual American annexation and U.S. statehood. While converting the native population to Christianity and attempting to tamp out prostitution with the visiting whalers, the missionaries also managed to nearly destroy the indigenous island way of life and begat a generation of children that would conspire with the U.S. military to overthrow the Hawaiian queen in 1893. With her rapier wit, Vowell describes the events of 1898, where in a spate of orgiastic imperialism, the U.S. annexed Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico in addition to invading Cuba and the Philippines, thus establishing the nation as an international superpower. Read more…

March 15, 2011: A Japanese search and rescue team searches the rubble near a high-rise building in Wakuya, Japan.

Today, Jacket Copy, the Los Angeles Times Book Blog, highlighted the March 28 issue of The New Yorker which will mainly focus on the devastating earthquake in Japan on March 11, the resulting deadly tsunami, and the current troubles at the Fukushima nuclear power plants. Articles in the issue will discuss the economic impact these brutal acts of nature will have on Japan’s future, and illustrate what the country will look like post-disaster. Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe also contributes a short essay on earthquakes and nuclear power in Japan. In a supplemental post on the The New Yorker website, Macy Halford comments on the deluge of images showing battered library stacks posted on the popular Japanese social network site Togetter.com. “Why libraries?, I wondered, as I scrolled through the images. I think it has to do with what is not shown in the pictures more than with what is. Books shaken to the floor provide a good visual measurement of the power of the quake…” she writes. Read more…

©2011 Lionsgate

Slick defense attorney Mickey Haller makes his screen debut today as the film adaptation of Michael Connelly’s bestselling thriller The Lincoln Lawyer arrives in theaters. Though the mystery writer has created numerous bestselling novels, this is only the second time his work has been translated into a movie. The first was the Clint Eastwood helmed Blood Work, a production in which Connelly had virtually no input, according to an article in The Seattle Times. The final product was disappointing to the author and his fans, as the altered story line lacked the spark that made the book so engrossing. But The Lincoln Lawyer production is a whole different beast, and this time the writer was allowed to participate in its creation. Connelly provided feedback on various drafts of the script, made several visits to the set, and discussed the Haller character with star, Matthew McConaughey, before filming began. Read more…

Seasoned art director Charlotte Strick struggled to find right visual balance when designing "Poser" book cover.

In an article for The Atlantic, Charlotte Strick, a seasoned art director for publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, discusses the evolution of a book cover design from initial ideas to final concept. During her 11 years working for the publisher, the designer has grown adept at taking general or amorphous direction from editors and creating innovative solutions. But when she was tasked with designing the jacket for Claire Dederer’s book Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, she faced a unique challenge. Strick’s personal interest in yoga fuel her excitement about the project, but her initial idea of photographing propped up silhouettes of people in yoga poses spelling out P-O-S-E-R did not turn out as anticipated. “In my mind’s eye the concept looked brilliant, but in reality it was all too fussy and totally unreadable. What was clear early on was that the photographs of the posing women were too literal and that illustration would not only add a playfulness (in keeping with the author’s tone) but also allow for increased (if not somewhat superhuman) flexibility in the letterforms,” she writes. Read more…

Freelance journalist Jonathan Bloom is on a mission. With his book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It), he hopes to educate people and open their eyes to the way the average American household carelessly manages food waste. In a world where innumerable people go hungry, even millions here in the U.S., it is a travesty that almost half of American crops end up in landfills. The tons of rotting food release methane gas into the atmosphere, thus harming the environment by contributing to the greenhouse effect. Through meticulous research and field-work, Bloom follows the food cycle from farms to the kitchen trash can, and documents the waste that goes on at all levels. A review in The Seattle Times calls the journalist “a fanatic against food waste”, and it is this fanaticism that drives him to study the economic and moral issues of how we as a nation treat our food, and come up with innovative solutions to the problem. Read more…

"Wimpy Kid" creator Jeff Kinney launches new content on Poptropica.com, where he serves as creative director.

The Wimpy Kid series has become a media blockbuster, spawning five bestselling books, a Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie released in 2010 and a second movie Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules scheduled to hit theaters on March 25. Yet, through all this success, Wimpy Kid creator Jeff Kinney has maintained a low-key life. He even kept his day job. Though, Kinney isn’t exactly stuck in cubicle-ville, his day job is pretty cool. He currently works as the executive producer and creative director for Poptropica.com, a high-traffic website geared toward pre-teens, where they can learn, play games and explore virtual islands. On March 14, Kinney will introduce Wimpy Kid content to the site with the launch of a new Wimpy Wonderland island. “It’s the other great love of my life,” the author tells AP. “It’s very difficult to walk away from an audience of 10 million kids a month. To know that you can make a positive impact on what they’re learning and what they’re experiencing online is sort of addictive.” Read more…

By Gabrielle Hamilton
Random House | 304pgs
Release Date: March 1, 2011

Summary:
New York chef Gabrielle Hamilton traces her unlikely path to gastronomic success in her new memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. The culinary entrepreneur spent her early childhood living with bohemian parents in rural Pennsylvania. But, her family fell apart during her early teens when her parents divorced, leaving Hamilton and her brother largely on their own. Though she became a bit of a wild child, experimenting with drugs, she was always drawn to the food business, and moved to New York at 16 to work as a waitress. She moved through several restaurant and catering jobs, and later back-packed through France, Greece and Turkey, often relying on meals provided by generous strangers to stave of her hunger. The culmination of all these experiences prompted Hamilton to open her small 30-seat restaurant Prune in the East Village during the late 1990′s. The chef had never ran a restaurant before, but achieved enormous success with the small eatery, winning acclaim with critics and the patronage of serious foodies. Her memoir, like her restaurant, emphasizes the link between food and human comfort. In Prune, Hamilton created a place where your server “would bring you something to eat or drink that you didn’t even ask for when you arrived cold and early and undone by your day in the city.” Read more…

Even before the debut of The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht’s freshman novel, the young author was getting literary accolades. Last year, at just 24 years of age, Obreht was named as one of The New Yorker‘s 20 under 40. At the tender age of 23, The Atlantic included her short story The Laugh in their Fiction Issue. This media buzz built up very high expectations for Obreht to deliver a stunning first novel, and judging by most early critical reviews, the young writer has succeeded. The Tiger’s Wife, which will be released on March 8, takes place in an unspecified war-torn Eastern European country, where young doctor Natalia Stefanovi learns of her beloved grandfather’s death. Natalia delves into the circumstances of her grandfather’s passing and reflects on his many mythical stories, including one about a tiger escaping the zoo in 1941 and the deaf-mute that develops a friendship with the beast. By and large, critics have been charmed by Obreht’s rising talent. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly calls the Belgrade-born author a “Balkan Scheherazade” and describes her literary voice as “so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop.” Read more…

Today marks the 107th birthday of Dr. Seuss, the beloved author of numerous touchstones of children’s literature such as Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop and Horton Hears a Who!. Born Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904, the writer and illustrator passed away in 1991, but the birthday of this scion of children’s books continues to be celebrated with Read Across America Day, a program created by National Education Association (NEA) in 1998. Throughout the nation, children, educators, librarians and people from all walks of life, will participate in reading activities to get kids excited about books. According to the NEA’s website: “Motivating children to read is an important factor in student achievement and creating lifelong successful readers. Research has shown that children who are motivated and spend more time reading do better in school.” Read more…