Oprah Spotlights Vegan

Diet, Book

L. A. Times

Oprah Winfrey is no stranger to eating a vegan diet -- she famously tried a 21-day vegan cleanse in 2008 -- but she recently upped the ante, convincing 378 staffers at her production company to go vegan for a week and documenting the results on Tuesday's "Oprah" episode.

Winfrey's guests included Michael Pollan, the author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and an expert on the meat industry, and Kathy Freston, whose new book "Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World" is currently Amazon's top seller. Also featured on the program was a segment in which reporter Lisa Ling visited a slaughterhouse.

Freston, whose previous book inspired Winfrey's first foray into the world of veganism, is nothing if not a persuasive advocate for plant-based diets: Journalist John Heilpern, who recently interviewed Freston for Vanity Fair, ended his article by explaining, "I will never become an alfalfa-and-brown-rice man, but since my lunch with Kathy Freston I have decided to give up eating all meat."

Animal-rights activists appeared divided on the episode's merits, with many commenting on Twitter and Facebook that they appreciated the exposure Oprah offered veganism but didn't appreciate the tone of the segment on animal slaughter, which some viewed as downplaying the inherent cruelty of killing animals for food.

Brit's Top Spy, Shamus

Reborn

The Ian Fleming estate have authorised the latest James Bond book, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's family have chosen author Anthony Horowitz to breath new life into Sherlock Holmes.

"It might have been in their mind that they wanted to attract a new audience to the short stories and novels of Conan Doyle", said Horowitz, who promises a Victorian setting with modern sensibilities.

He told Sky News: "I am best known as a children's author with the Alex Rider books.

"There's a huge audience of boys and girls leaving children's books behind them and looking for more adult books and therefore it is a perfect fit."

Anthony Horowitz is writing a new Sherlock Holmes novel

American author Jeffrey Deaver is setting part of his new Bond book in the Middle East.

The Fleming family will no doubt be hoping to capitalise on the success of Sebastian Faulks' Bond novel 'Devil May Care', and the young Bond series by Charlie Higson.

"You have always got the feeling that Fleming is looking over your shoulder", said Higson.

"And you are always aware that what you're doing is basically playing around with toys that Ian Fleming created and they are toys that boys loved playing around with.

"So it was fabulous fun for me and it never felt a burden."

Charlie Higson wrote the young James Bond series.  Keeping the traditionalist fans happy whilst drawing in a new audience is not easy.

But if Horowitz and Deaver do find the right formula they may well find themselves as rich as their stories.

The Times book critic Barry Forshaw said: "I actually think these two new books cannot fail.

"Both are by high-profile authors, the franchises still exist in film form and there are two simultaneous franchises of Sherlock Holmes.

"Also the Bond films have been re-activated, so there is that interest again and if a new author can do something new, something fresh with the character, that is good as well."

Sky News

Sacked for Writing

Racy Novel with Students

by Chris Brooke

An English teacher was sacked after writing a racy novel for pupils about their sexual fantasies and truancy, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.

Leonora Rustamova, known as Miss Rusty, said it was an attempt to inspire the 15-year-old boys as they hated women and were regularly in trouble with police, overtly racist and violent.

But her husband then accidentally made the novel, titled Stop! Don’t Read This, available on the internet.

Head Stephen Ball, who Mrs Rustamova said had described the project as a ‘triumph’ and a ‘superb job’ for interesting the group in literacy, suspended and then fired her.

Yesterday she started a bid for compensation.

Mrs Rustamova, 40, worked at Calder High School, a comprehensive in Halifax, for 11 years.

She read chapters in class and used feedback from a group of pupils who called themselves ‘the Commie Boys’ in writing the novel.

It features a teacher, also called Miss Rusty, and five Year 11 pupils who are her ‘favourites’.

Daily Mail

Got Testosterone?

The gender imbalance at the heart of the British and American literary establishment has been laid bare by a new study confirming that leading literary magazines focus their review coverage on books written by men, and commission more men than women to write about them.

Statistics compiled by Vida, an American organisation for women in the literary arts, found gender imbalances in every one of the publications cited, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.

In the UK, the LRB reviewed 68 books by women and 195 by men in 2010, with men taking up 74% of the attention, and 78% of the reviews written by men. Seventy-five per cent of the books reviewed in the TLS were written by men (1,036 compared to 330) with 72% of its reviewers men.

Meanwhile Granta magazine, which does not review but includes original contributions, featured the work of 26 female and 49 male writers in 2010, with men making up 65% of the total.

In the US, The New York Review of Books shows a stronger bias. Among authors reviewed, 83% are men (306 compared to 59 women and 306 men), and the same statistic is true of reviewers (200 men, 39 women). The New York Times Book Review fares better, with only 60% of reviewers men (438 compared to 295 women). Of the authors with books reviewed, 65% were by men (524 compared to 283 by women).

"The truth is, these numbers don't lie," said Vida. "But that is just the beginning of this story. What, then, are they really telling us? We know women write. We know women read. It's time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don't reflect those facts with any equity."

Guardian

Assange Hires Ghost

For Memoir

The news that Andrew O'Hagan has signed on to ghost the book for which Julian Assange has already been paid more than $1m is a piquant reminder that while everyone has a book in them, not everyone can get it out.

The revelations of WikiLeaks run to an estimated 300m words, but it seems that its founder either cannot or will not manage the modest 70–80,000 words about himself that his publishers have requested.

Assange is not the first. More than is generally realised, the bestselling titles of our time have a troubled (shall we say complicated?) relationship with the names whose authorship they advertise. Keith Richards's Life was written by James Fox. Katie Price (aka Jordan) relied on Rebecca Farnworth to launch her career as a novelist with Angel. Further down the food chain, even that infuriating meerkat from the comparethemarket.com adverts has had A Simples Life put together by Val Hudson, formerly of Headline.

The top category of ghosted titles, now a declining market, remains the misery memoir, books such as Tell me Why, Mummy or Please, Daddy, No, or Sharon Osbourne's Extreme: My Autobiography.

During the past 10 years, this genre has been a huge money-spinner, accounting for almost 10% of the UK book market, closely followed by run-of-the-mill celebrity autobiographies (Russell Brand's My Booky Wook), true crime memoirs (Dave Courtney's Stop the Ride, I Want to Get Off), sporting lives (Wayne Rooney's My Story So Far) and tales of derring-do (Bruce Parry, Bear Grylls, et al). As some publishers have discovered, it's not always a licence to print money. Bill Oddie's One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Egg sold just 4,811 copies.

The ghost's world may be one of jeopardy, but it's probably less perilous than it is depicted in Robert Harris's thriller The Ghost. First, there's the inevitable tussle over money. Traditionally, the ghost receives 33% of the advance (plus royalties). In recession, this has been squeezed to as little as 10%, a figure the better class of ghost will disdain.

Often, battles over the money pale into insignificance next to the titanic clash of egos involved in taking on another's voice and character. The ghosts I've spoken to tell me that the subject they approach with utter dread is the fragile personality with pretensions to authorship.

Who is not vulnerable to the tug of amour-propre? The ghost, who starts out as a hybrid of therapist, muse and friend, enters a psychological minefield. The ghost should, I'm advised, never forget that, at the end of the day, he or she ranks somewhere between a valet and a cleaner. Jennie Erdal's Ghosting is an entertaining and often moving account of life in this literary skeleton cupboard.

The Guardian

Bits & Bytes

Thousands More Listings for AmSAW PROFESSIONAL MEMBERS Today

FICTION

Debut

Stegner Fellow and recent contributor to The New Yorker, Jim Gavin's collection of stories MIDDLE MEN, a humorous and panoramic view of Southern California and of a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets, making doomed forays into middle class respectability, and a novel, THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHROME AND NICOTINE, to Anjali Singh at Simon & Schuster, at auction, by PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit (NA).

Adjunct professor at Montana State University and a Pushcart Prize winner Glen Chamberlain's CONJUGATIONS OF THE VERB TO BE, comprising stories about ordinary people, illustrating that we choose, consciously or not, the verbs by which we act; how we move from one state of existence to another, to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at Delphinium Books, for publication in Fall 2011, by Sandra Bond at Bond Literary Agency.

Bennington MFA graduate J. Ross Angelella's ZOMBIE, narrated by a 14-yr-old boy whose obsessions with zombie films and women's magazines help him weather both life at an all-boys Catholic school and the increasingly disturbing behavior of his father, to Mark Doten at Soho Press, for publication in Spring 2012, by Douglas Stewart at Sterling Lord Literistic (World English).

Women's/Romance

Jennifer Hudson Taylor's HEART'S INHERITANCE, part of a 4-novella collection entitled "Highland Crossing", to Rebecca Germany at Barbour, in a nice deal, by Terry Burns at Hartline Literary Agency.

terry@hartlineliterary.com

General/Other

NYT bestselling author of A DOG'S PURPOSE and the forthcoming EMORY'S GIFT, W. Bruce Cameron's sequel to A DOG'S PURPOSE and a Christmas novella, to Kristin Sevick at Forge, in a major deal, both for publication in 2012, by Scott Miller at Trident Media Group.

Brick Lane author Monica Ali's UNTOLD STORY, imagining a future for Princess Diana if she hadn't died in the Alma Tunnel in Paris in 1997; imagining her future and examining the meaning of identity, the cost of celebrity, and the need to find one's place in the world; like Diana, the fictional princess who is the novel's heroine, is both icon and iconoclast; will she ever find peace and happiness in her own life, or will the curse of fame always be too great?, to Nan Graham at Scribner, for publication in June 2011.

Children's: Young Adult

DARK LIFE author Kat Falls's THE FETCH, a dystopian romance trilogy set in a future where the U.S. has been divided by a wall separating the civilized West from the disease-ravaged East - now called the Savage Zone - in which a 16-year-old must leave everyone she loves behind to enter the frightening Savage Zone, where she meets a mysterious boy who's not all that he seems to be, to Nick Eliopulos at Scholastic, in a significant deal, in a three-book deal, for publication in Fall 2012, by Josh Adams and Tracey Adams at Adams Literary (World)).

josh@adamsliterary.com

NONFICTION

Advice/Relationships

Dr. Alexander Loyd's THE HEALING CODE, which promises to heal the source of any health, success, or relationship issue in just six minutes through activation of a physical function of the body, to Diana Baroni at Grand Central Life & Style, in a significant deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in February 2011, by Bonnie Solow at Solow Literary Enterprises.

Biography

Greg Tobin's THE GOOD POPE AND HIS GREAT COUNCIL: A Biography of Saint John XXIII and Vatican II, a reappraisal of the life of the "Good Pope" to understand why the Church of his successors faces such great peril today on the 50th anniversary of Vatican II and the 2013 canonization of John XXIII, to Michael Maudlin at Harper One for publication in Fall 2012, by Stephen Hanselman, LevelFiveMedia.

History/Politics/Current Affairs

Josh Glasser's THE EIGHTEENTH DAY RUNNING MATE: Elation and Heartbreak in the Candidacy of Thomas Eagleton, exploring the campaign drama that captivated the nation in the summer of 1972 -- the selection and ultimate removal of fellow Amherst alum, Thomas Eagleton, from the McGovern ticket due to revelations that he suffered from depression and received electroshock treatment, to Ileene Smith at Yale University Press, for publication in summer 2012, by Kathy Robbins and Ian King at The Robbins Office (World English).

i.smith@yale.edu

Humor

Jillian Madison's DAMN YOU, AUTOCORRECT!, based on the blog of the same name, a humorous collection of the most inappropriate auto-corrected text messages on your iPhones, Blackberries, and other smart phones, to Matt Inman at Hyperion, at auction, for publication in March 2011, by Monika Verma at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency (NA).

UK rights to Ed Faulkner at Virgin Books, in a pre-empt.

Rights: efisher@levinegreenberg.com

Memoir

Shaquille O'Neal's "all-encompassing" autobiography, capturing his extensive and successful career on the basketball court, while also presenting a thorough look at his off-the-court activities and pursuits; co-written by WHEN THE GAME WAS OURS author Jackie MacMullan, to Rick Wolff at Grand Central, at auction, for publication in Fall 2011, by Jay Mandel at William Morris Endeavor (World).

Narrative

A. J. Mackinnon's THE WELL AT THE WORLD'S END, the true story of an old-fashioned quest by a modern adventurer; a traveller sets out on foot to find a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth; along the way, he has a series of humorous adventures, to Julie Matysik at Skyhorse, by Markus Hoffmann at Regal Literary (NA).

sophyw@blackincbooks.com

Parenting

Mrs. Q's FED UP WITH LUNCH: The School Lunch Project -- How One Anonymous Teacher Survived a Year of School Lunches, foreword by Jamie Oliver, chronicling the dark side of school lunches, and offering a guide to change through "quiet revolution," to Leigh Haber at Chronicle, by Sarah Bridgins at Frances Goldin Literary Agency.