On the Books June 13: Andrew McCarthy to pen travel memoir, Salman Rushdie talks 'The Next People'

Image Credit: Laurence Agron/PR Photos

++ Simon & Schuster announced today that multi-faceted actor Andrew McCarthy will pen a travel memoir entitled The Longest Way Home: One Man’s Global Quest for the Courage to Settle Down, to be released in Fall 2012 by the imprint Free Press. McCarthy, who has starred in iconic 80′s movies such as Pretty in Pink, Less than Zero, and Weekend at Bernie’s, has more recently been a prolific (and award-winning) travel writer for a number of publications. The Longest Way Home, through “seven exotic trips,” will explore the “tumultuous, complicated, and circuitous route he has traveled to finally settle down with one woman, who will marry this summer,” according to a press release.

++ Author Salman Rushdie’s Showtime series The Next People is underway, with an “almost feature-film budget,” Rushdie tells the Observer. He describes it as a “paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people.” The Booker Prize-winner also sounded off on TV’s power vs. that of film and novels. “In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee,” he says. “In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.” He also notes that for the first time in his writing life, he’s not currently working on a novel — but he is writing a memoir of the troubled period starting in 1988 with the fatwa following publication of The Satanic Verses and the ensuing decade he spent in hiding.