U Star Novels In the Media

The Book Bench

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Thanks to the no-book clause in his contract, Joe Torre won’t be writing a memoir about the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Alexandra Penney, who blogs as the Bag Lady, has signed a deal to write a memoir about getting bilked by Bernard Madoff.

Someday, U.K. readers will have the Kindle, too. Meanwhile, the new Kindle 2, which can read books aloud, may violate authors’ audio-book rights.

Bob Stein, the executive director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, believes books are no longer objects, but places.

The Washington Post suggests “five books for when your job is threatened”; the author of “The Untold History of the Potato” lists the Top Ten spud tomes.

Elmore Leonard will receive the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement from the Western Writers of America during its annual convention this summer.

Britain’s Romantic Novelists’ Association gave its “romantic novel of the year” award to Julia Gregson’s “East of the Sun.”

A company called U Star Novels is selling customized erotica.

“People write articles about publishing in the New York Times as though it’s a really sustainable, viable, powerful industry, and it’s really not,” the publisher Neil Ortenberg says. “There’s something kind of sweet about that, in a way.”