Nov 19 2009 11:14 AM ET

Lauren Conrad to pen style book

Categories: Celebrity, News

HarperCollins announced today that it has acquired rights to Lauren Conrad Style, a “4-color” fashion and style guide. The book, which will be published in fall 2010, will also include never-before-seen photos of the former star of MTV’s The Hills. “I am really excited to write a style guide,” Conrad said in a press release from HarperCollins. “I think fashion should be fun and reflective of who you are. When you wear clothes you feel good in, it shows in everything you do. I know this guide will offer simple, practical tips to help anyone look fabulous.” Last spring, HarperCollins published Conrad’s young-adult novel L.A. Candy, the first of a planned three-book series about a 19-year-old California girl who becomes a reality TV star. (Well, they say write what you know.) To date, the book has sold an impressive 166,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks roughly 70 percent of retail book sales. The novel’s sequel, Sweet Little Lies, will hit stands Feb. 2, 2010.

Nov 18 2009 11:11 PM ET

Colum McCann's 'Let the Great World Spin' wins National Book Award

Let the Great World Spin, Irish-born writer Colum McCann’s well-received novel about 1970s New York City, won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night. Other winners announced at the 60th annual ceremony in New York City included T.J. Stiles’ The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt for nonfiction, Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies for poetry, and Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice for young people’s literature. (Hoose, a finalist in the same category in 2001, won for his book about the African American civil rights pioneer who refused to give up her seat on a bus years before Rosa Parks.)

There was one more competitive prize announced at the black-tie dinner at Manhattan’s Cipriani Wall Street, a Best of the National Book Awards Award. Based on 10,000 votes from the reading public, one title emerged as the favorite of all the winners in the prize’s 60-year history: Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, a posthumous collection that won the fiction prize in 1972.

The National Book Foundation, which administers the prizes (worth $10,000 each), also presented honorary medals to Gore Vidal for distinguished contribution to American letters and to author/activist/McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers (the Literarian Award).

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Nov 18 2009 11:36 AM ET

We read (and watched) Sarah Palin so you don't have to

In her new book — and ubiquitous press appearances — Sarah Palin sounds off on everything from caribou to Katie Couric. Here’s what she had to say:

On John McCain asking her to be his running mate:

“I’d known it was only a matter of time before others saw Alaska’s potential to contribute to America’s future. Now the time was right.”

On Katie Couric:

“Where do I begin?” Palin muses of the infamous 2008 sit-down with the CBS anchor. “In the harried pace of the campaign, I mistakenly let myself become annoyed…with many of her repetitive, biased questions.” (Couric tells EW “the interview speaks for itself.”)

On SNL:

“[Amy Poehler] was very pregnant,” Palin recalls of her campaign stop on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. “She and [my daughter] Bristol compared belly sizes…. Very nice of Amy, I thought. Very down to earth.” She adds, “Josh Brolin, Mark Wahlberg, and the singer Adele were also on the show that night, as was director Oliver Stone, who made a cameo appearance. Unbelievably, he is a supporter of Communist dictator Hugo Chavez, who in a 2006 speech to the United Nations referred to the president of the United States as ‘the devil himself.’ I did not shake Stone’s hand.”

On meeting her husband, Todd:

Love at first sight? Not exactly. (Read full post)

Nov 17 2009 03:38 PM ET

Candace Bushnell's 'Sex and the City' prequel

HarperCollins has revealed the cover art of The Carrie Diaries, the first of Candace Bushnell’s two prequels to Sex and the City. The novel — written for a young adult audience — is written from the perspective of Carrie Bradshaw as a teenager and goes on sale April 27, 2010.

Okay, I’m guessing the adolescent Carrie wasn’t a geek or the prom queen. But a Queen Bee? Maybe. And definitely editor of the school paper. What do you think?

Nov 17 2009 01:41 PM ET

Exclusive: Melissa de la Cruz on her new series

Hyperion has signed Melissa de la Cruz — whose Blue Bloods vampire books have all been huge YA hits —to a two-book deal for an adult paranormal series. The first, The Witches of East End, will go on sale in May 2011. “It’s about a mother and two daughters who move to town and shake things up,” says de la Cruz. “There’s already a family of warlocks living there who aren’t too happy with their arrival…It’s based on old Norse mythology.” She notes that characters from Blue Bloods will show up in the books — “some in essential roles; others more tangential” and says, of her switch to adult fiction, “I’ve been writing YA books for more than a decade. Many of my fans have grown up.  Now I can have more grown-up themes: One character works in a bar; another gets involved with the mayor. There are romantic entanglements that are not so innocent!”

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Nov 17 2009 10:02 AM ET

Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue': The EW Review

Categories: Review, Sarah Palin

She cooks a mean moose chili (though, as she admits, she “never pretended to have a huge culinary repertoire”). She doesn’t mention Levi Johnston, the father of her daughter Bristol’s baby — not once. Her passages about her son Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome, are incredibly moving.

But before you start scanning this review of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue for a lefty New York bias, let me be clear: I’m not affiliated with any political party. I’ve voted for Democrats; I’ve voted for Republicans. That said, Going Rogue is nothing special, a standard bit of political posturing from someone still eyeing higher office. That’s clear from the jacket photo alone: Palin, hair down, gazing sturdily into the distance, clad in a red track jacket (no fancy duds here), an American flag pinned to her chest. I’m like you, the photo says. “[Todd and I] felt our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much-needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.,” she writes.

Though Palin says that in college she “studied journalism because of my passion for the power of words,” she hired a ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, for Going Rogue. Fair enough: Writing a newspaper article is much different from crafting a full-length book. But Vincent did her no favors. Her attempts to mime Palin’s no-nonsense speech sometimes result in painful manglings: “I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.” Still, the first few chapters — about Palin’s early life in Alaska — are down-to-earth and funny (“You know you’re Alaskan when at least twice a year your kitchen doubles as a meat processing plant”). But the passages about her personal politics and her stint as Alaska’s governor are less than forthright, and the description of her time with the McCain campaign reads less like history than like ax grinding.

What’s more, Palin displays virtually no introspection. When McCain asks her to run, she says, “I certainly didn’t think, Well, of course this would happen. But neither did I think, What an astonishing idea. It seemed more comfortable than that, a natural progression.” Wait a minute: Moving swiftly from mayor of Wasilla to governor of Alaska to Vice President of the United States is a natural progression? I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that Palin owes readers a little more than that. Yet maybe that’s naive of me. Palin has just done what almost all politicians do — delivered a mediocre, unsurprising, self-serving memoir. C


Nov 16 2009 12:16 PM ET

Talking Books: Week of 11/16

Categories:

Desperate to know what your favorite writers are doing when they’re not with you? Talking Books will help you keep an eye on your significant authors.

11/16

Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life, on The Oprah Winfrey Show (check local listings)

Jake Adelstein, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart (Comedy Central, 11 p.m. EDT)

11/17

Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur, on Last Call With Carson Daly (NBC, 1:35 a.m. EDT)

Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, on The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 11:30 p.m. EDT)

11/18

David Plouffe, The Audacity to Win, on Last Call With Carson Daly (NBC, 1:35 a.m. EDT)

Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, and Paul Mooney, Black is the New White, on Tavis Smiley (PBS, check local listings)

11/19

Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography, on Tavis Smiley (PBS, check local listings)

Nov 16 2009 10:54 AM ET

'Bloom County The Complete Collection': Totally '80s humor - and a penguin, too!

43932843I can’t really overemphasize the role Berke Breathed’s Pulitzer-winning ’80s comic strip Bloom County played in my life. Its prepubescent hero, Milo Bloom, was a budding journalist of dubious ethics. He had a best friend named Binkley who was fond of wearing tutus (much to the chagrin of his football-loving dad). And they palled around with an endearing penguin named Opus. The fact that I turned out to be a gay, penguin-fancying journalist with an offbeat sense of humor? It ain’t pure coincidence.

So imagine my delight to reacquaint myself with the origins of Breathed’s pre-Opus opus, the first of a planned five-volume compendium of the strip’s nearly nine-year, Pulitzer-winning run. Bloom County The Complete Collection, Volume One includes several pages of The Academia Waltz, the strip that Breathed drew for the student newspaper at the University of Texas, Austin in 1978-79. It was very much a Doonesbury homage, as I suspect most college comics were in those days — though it did introduce an early version of both the preppie cad Steve Dallas and the wheelchaired Vietnam vet Cutter John, who would become regulars in Bloom County. (Read full post)

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Nov 13 2009 12:50 PM ET

Sarah Palin's memoir leaked; Katie Couric is 'badgering'

Categories: News, Sarah Palin

going-rogue_lHow does Sarah Palin feel about the whole election process now that a year has passed? I don’t know, Alaska.

According to the AP, which apparently managed to procure an early copy of the vice-presidential candidate’s memoir Going Rogue, she’s not very happy with how everything went down. In the book, due out next Tuesday, she claims that the John McCain political machine straight-talk-expressed her and left her with $50,000 in legal bills from the vetting process. Additionally, she avers that the campaign had kept her “bottled up,” exercising complete control over her image and message and even going so far as to refuse her changes to the press release regarding her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy. The McCain camp has denied asking Palin to pay any costs related to vetting, stating that they are unaware of any personal expenses she may have incurred.

Palin also dedicates a good deal of ink to the infamous Katie Couric interview, branding the CBS anchor as “badgering” and as having a “partisan agenda.” Interestingly, though, the book also mentions that the campaign shared a New York stylist with Couric.

AP is calling the tone of Rogue, which was written with Lynn Vincent, “folksy” and “homespun,” which is probably to be expected from the woman who returned “Golly-gee!” and “Don’t cha know?” to the national lexicon for the first time since Fargo.

What do you think? Do you find the former governor’s allegations surprising? Do you plan to read her book?

Nov 12 2009 02:37 PM ET

What's the best book you read this year?

Categories:

shelf-life_lIt’s getting to be that time of year—the time for Best and Worst lists—and as I mull over EW’s, I’m thinking back over everything I’ve read since January.

It’s going to be a tough year to pick. On the nonfiction side, I loved Blake Bailey’s wonderful Cheever book, which, as I’ve said before, redefined  biography for me. I could not get enough of the essays in A New Literary History of America. Almost a year after I read it, The Mercy Papers—Robin Romm’s searing account of her mother’s final three weeks—remains imprinted on my brain. There was the Dave Eggers book, Zeitoun; Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open; Dave Cullen’s Columbine; and the third volume of Mary Karr’s memoirs, Lit. Oh, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

In fiction, I loved Daniyeel Mueenuddin’s exquisite Pakistan-centered short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and the latest Pete Dexter novel, Spooner. I could not put down Alice Munro’s latest book of short stories, Too Much Happiness. I bought a dozen copies of Jonathan Tropper’s dysfunctional family drama This Is Where I Leave You to give to friends and family. I was mesmerized by David Small’s graphic novel Stitches. And I still think about Stephanie Kallos’ Sing Them Home, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement and Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

How about you, Shelf Life readers? What are your favorite books of the year?

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