Bay Area Books

From California's deep south come rumblings that the movie based on Michael Lewis' Moneyball might be back in play.

If you recall, Steven Soderberg was originally teed up (please forgive the mixed sports metaphor) to direct the Brad Pitt vehicle about how the Oakland A's used statistics rather than stars to build a winning team. But then Columbia Pictures pulled the plug, following "creative differences."

From the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog comes word that, now that West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin has penned a new script, Pitt and studio executives have been talking with directors, including (500) Days of Summer's Marc Webb and Capote's Bennett Miller. "With a number of conferences now taking place on the mound, it may not be long before someone starts throwing heat," writes Risky Business's Steven Zeitchik.

Dave Eggers' year just keeps getting better.

The New York Times reports that Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme has optioned the movie rights to Zeitoun, Eggers' latest book about a Syrian man in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

Inspired by the book's cover, by Washington state-based artist Rachel Sumpter, Demme said he plans to do the film as an animated feature, possibly using a hand-drawn style.

The Times reports an Eggers rep as saying the option money was paid to the Zeitoun Foundation, a non-profit set up to use profits from the sale of the book to help rebuild New Orleans and promote human rights.

Newsweek interviews director Spike Jonze, screenwriter Dave Eggers, and author Maurice Sendak about the new Where the Wild Things Are movie, that's opening (finally!) on Friday.

We learn that Jonze thought he was making a film about childhood while the studio thought he was making a movie for children (oops); that the monsters in the book were based on large, non-English-speaking relatives who used to come over on weekends and make Sendak and his siblings wonder if they were going eat them for dinner instead of their mother's bland cooking; and that Eggers was a big old 'fraidy cat as a kid (but then again, so were we).

But more on topic, Newsweek asks Eggers about the difference between writing a novel and a movie:

Eggers: Writing this script couldn't be more different than sitting alone and writing a novel. With Spike and I, we were really in the room together for eight hours a day, and writing for at least 20 minutes of that. We really examined and fought over every word as we went along. Before we put any dialogue down, we had talked for weeks about who each character was and what they were motivated by, and what did Douglas want, what was his relationship with Carol, what would they do in this situation together. Spike had to make sure these characters were as deep and real as possible. We had whole backstories for each one of them.

Photo: Where the Wild Things Area

The Bay Area literary world is nothing if not diverse, but Anita Laughlin brings us a new twist on book topics. Laughlin, an elementary-school teacher in Palo Alto, is married to Stanford professor Robert Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998.

Mrs. Laughlin seized the opportunity, writing "Reindeer with King Gustaf: What to Expect When Your Spouse Wins the Nobel Prize," a light-hearted, behind-the-scenes account of what this sort of thing can do to a family.

One occasionally sees a spouse's-point-of-view title on the bookshelf, but this is likely the first such endeavor regarding the Nobel Prize. Says Laughlin: "It demystifies, clarifies and humanizes the Nobel experience."

The book was released by Wyatt-MacKenzie on Oct. 1.

Wife and husband went so far as to reenact the 2:30 a.m. phone call they received from Stockholm, informing them of the victory. Watch the video at her Web site.

What the Internet did for newspaper and magazine reading, Vook wants to do for books.

The San Francisco-based startup is named after its product -- the vook -- a combination of text and video that can be accessed online or downloaded onto an iPhone.

It essentially interjects video clips into the pages of an e-book, in much the same way that online news stories link to outside sources. Thus, when reading Jude Deveraux's They are Promises, one can take a break from words by watching arty videos depicting antebellum women racing through what appear to be plantations.

In a New York Times report, Deveraux said that she wrote the novella in six days, then worked with the filmmaker Robert Sobul in developing the video segments. She said it would be possible to read the text without watching the videos, but that readers might miss some lines of dialogue or scenery.

Deveraux is one of four authors whose books Simon & Schuster's Altria imprint has licensed to Vook. Others include The 90-Second Fitness Solution by Pete Cerqua, Richard Doetsch's The Embassy and Return to Beauty by Narine Nikososian.

Vook is the creation of former San Francisco Examiner business columnist and startup veteran Brad Inman.

Each Vook publication sells for $6.99, and is available on the Simon & Schuster and Vook Web sites and at the Apple iPhone application store. Because Amazon's Kindle doesn't support video, it is not an option for distribution.

Beet.TV recently interviewed Altria's publisher, Judith Curr. Watch below, along with a promo clip for Vook.

A couple of weeks ago, we told you how San Francisco author Kemble Scott's e-book was debuting at number five on the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list. Now the book has made it into print.

Scott tells All Things D's Kara Swisher that, following the news about The Sower's success, he was contacted by three different publishers.

His main concern? The story is relevant now. He didn't want to wait the usual 18 months to see it on store shelves.

"So this one publisher Numina Press, out of Marin, said, 'I can do this in a matter of weeks,'" Scott says. "Sure enough, from the time I signed a contract to the time it arrived in stores was 29 days."

Swisher: "Do you think that's where publishing's going?"

Scott: "I do. I think the technology of publishing books is also advancing at the same time that e-books and other things are happening.... It can be done now. I don't know that it could have been done years ago."

Boing Boing and guest blogger Bassam Tariq, who is co-author of the New York-based blog 30 Mosques, are holding a haiku contest to give away a few copies of Dave Eggers' newest book, Zeitoun. Post yours in the comments, and if they like it, a free book you get.

Some submissions so far:

Society floats
in such a fragile canoe.
Storm clouds gathering.

"Brownie, you're doing
a heck of a job," George Bush
said. Meanwhile, we drowned.

the water is rising
must go back for my books
glub glub glub glub glub

There once was a man
Named Dave Eggers who - wait - what?
Oh ... you said "haiku"

oops, i posted twice
it was that damn flash plug-in
crashing my browser!

It's been quite a year for Dave Eggers.

The film that he wrote with his wife, Vendela Vida, Away We Go, came out in June. His book about Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun, came out in July. His 300-page rewrite of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are comes out in October, as does the film based on it.

And now comes word Eggers will receive the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community at the National Book Awards ceremony in New York in November. The award is given to the individual whose "life and work" exemplify the foundation's goals of "expanding the audience for literature and enhancing the cultural value of literature in America." The foundation is honoring Eggers for his work founding the 826 writing and tutoring centers and creating the Voices of Witness project, "a series of books using oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world."

Photo credit: 826 Chicago

The keys to commercial literary success are the big New York publishing houses, right?

Well, maybe not.

Kemble Scott, the San Francisco author of San Francisco Chronicle bestseller SOMA, is publishing his new book, The Sower, on Scribd. Cost: $2 a pop. Scott gets 80%.

OK fine, you say. So his mother and best friend download the pdf. BFD.

Well, not exactly. The Sower, a story about a gay San Franciscan who carries a virus that can cure all diseases but can only be transmitted via sex (well, OK), was released just a few weeks ago and is now debuting at number five on the Chronicle bestseller list.

Go figure.

For the full scoop on Kemble's novel marketing strategy (no pun intended, really), check out Frances Dinkelspiel's take at SFGate's City Brights.

Do you remember that amazing article Po Bronson had in New York back in 2007? The one about the "power (and peril) of praising your kids"? About how kids who are used to getting praised for getting things right freeze up when they run into obstacles and ultimately don't learn how to push on through as easily as kids who are simply praised for making an effort?

We at BayNewser were blown away, promptly sent the link to everyone we knew who had children, and haven't treated our nieces and nephew the same since.

It probably shouldn't be any surprise then that Bronson's new book, written with Ashley Merryman, has gotten as high as #15 on Amazon.

The trailer for the book is on YouTube. (We would have posted it here, but they've embedded it inside a widget that forces you to post all four of the NurtureShock/Po Bronson-being interviewed videos, and we consider that a beer foul.)