So, I've got CNN Headline News on in the background (Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares is over) and my ears pick up when I hear the words: "Controversy. Children's Book. Marijuana." Well, sounds like book news to me. Turns out Ricardo Cortes, director of Magic Propaganda Mill has self-published It's Just a Plant, "an illustrated children's book about marijuana" that is "a book for parents who want to educate their children about the complexities of pot in a thoughtful, fact-oriented manner." Seems to me that this could be a gateway book to harder subjects, like "it's just a needle" (Trainspotting), or, gasp, faux memoirs about drug abuse and rehab (cough: Frey).

I reached out to the best expert I could on the subject of reefer and literature, none other than Mike Edison, former publisher of High Times and author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go (BTW, I can't wait to go to that book launch party next week!) to see what he thought of "the ganja" as a suitable subject for a picture book.

The book's premise stinks worse than Snoop Dogg's last record - little kids catching mommy and daddy in the act of getting stoned? If you can't get stoned without getting busted by your six-year old, you should have you bong taken away. I am all for education, but there is something seriously wrong about teaching first-graders about weed. What's next, Fisher Price's "My First Water Pipe"? The whole thing sounds like some vast stoner conspiracy to increase the flagging circulation of anachronistic marijuana magazines. Either that or Bill O'Reilly created it so he'd have something new to scream about. What someone should really write is a dumbed-down book for gullible parents who've been conned by corrupt pharmaceutical companies to keep their kids high on behavior-modification drugs.

Mike should know what is and what's not appropriate, especially with the subtitle to his book being "Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World."

As a side note, what I love is how Headline News paired this story with the new White House report on dope use and mental illness and the story about the teens who (in this great headline) Dig Up Skull For Pot 'Bong'.

With this promotional video for the paperback release of James Rollins's The Judas Strain, the book trailer takes on the complete look and feel of its Hollywood counterpart. The sources at HarperCollins who passed the video along confirmed that the action scenes were shot especially for the trailer by Brady Hall, a Seattle-based filmmaker who also works with Meg Cabot on her wacky videos, as well as animated trailers for the Warrior Cats, Septimus Heap, and Dangerous Book franchises. (So, yes, all that swirling hieroglyphic animation is his handiwork, too.)

So we got a press release this morning about how the ninth annual "Get Caught Reading Month" has been going on for over a week now, with celebrities like Dylan and Cole Sprouse reminding kids that "reading is a fun brain-feeder and it stays with you for a lifetime," and this year there's a new component to the campaign called "Get Caught Listening," which is all about, according to the press release, "the particular pleasures of books in audio format." So far, we know "the heart of the campaign will be pre-recorded audio voice-overs of traditional and celebrity authors sharing their passion for audiobooks, complemented by a print campaign of those authors 'getting caught' listening to their favorite audio books," but we probably won't find out who those authors are until the campaign's official launch at BookExpo America—a launch that is scheduled to spill over into June's National Audiobook Month.

Which I thought was some new marketing gimmick, but according to Google it's been going for a couple years now. Huh. But it's that "traditional authors" nomenclature that cracks me up, every time. You don't see this in other creative fields; Scarlett Johansson doesn't get billed as a "celebrity vocalist," for example, and you never get an exhibit of "traditional and celebrity painters."

Count on David Sedaris to sidestep the whole thorny memoir-truth issue with humor. When 'When You Are Engulfed In Flames'comes out next month, it "will carry a short preface, labeling the contents 'real-ish.'" I guess I've always thought that if 97 percent of the story is true, then that's an acceptable formula," he told the Christian Science Monitor.

Sedaris goes on to say that "we live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book and it turns out some of it's not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they'd spent on that book. We're in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones."

The issue of how long someone whose sales were predicated on sympathy and trust spent in jail might not seem like a "small lie" to everyone, of course, but yeah, it's not a WMD-level whopper. So I guess I, like, 97% agree with Sedaris.

A dispatch from Berlin brings word of a new biography of Max Schreck, the German actor who played the vampire in the 1922 film Nosferatu, an outlaw version of Dracula. "Whoever hopes to discover a vampire will be disappointed, but they will find an actor of real skill and versatility," biographer Stefan Eickhoff tells Reuters. "Yet he himself remains somewhat shrouded in mystery." Max Schreck—Gespenstertheater ("Ghost Theater") will be published in Germany later this year. There's no mention of any American interest yet, but you translate this into English and it seems like it might be of a kind with the early Hollywood biographies the University Press of Kentucky has been doing regularly for the past few years...

"I wouldn't say that birds are Jewish," Jonathan Rosen said, with some light chuckling from the audience, during the Q&A portion of his lecture at the John Templeton Foundation's inaugural book forum earlier this week. Elaborating on the question, he emphasized that the condition birds spoke to, the one that inspired the questioning comparison—"we do not know exactly where we belong, where our native ground is, where our homes are"—was, particularly in the early 21st century, more universal in scope. Other questions from the audience were more playful: "Are there bagel-eating pigeons riding the A train into Manhattan?" Rosen responded in disbelief to one such query.

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As far as nascent literary subgenres go, there may be none sadder than the maternal counter-memoir. As we wait for Augusten Burroughs' mom to come out with her version of the truth, we can -- if we're French-- already read Lucie Ceccaldi's take on her son Michel Houellebecq's dysfunctional childhood, which he fictionalized in 'The Elementary Particles.'

Angelique Chrisafis, who interviewed her in the Guardian, says that while "literary theorists welcome the precious psychological insight into the biggest voice of a generation," everyone else might just find the situation sad: Ceccaldi says that her son is an "evil, stupid little bastard" and adds that "this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all - above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame." One senses that Houellebecq won't be sending any Teleflora bouquets or Hallmark cards her way this or any other year.

Last night Christopher Erkmann from HarperCollins's art dept showed me the coolest cover ever for the mass market edition of Kevin J Anderson's The Last Days of Krypton which comes out this September. Remember those holographic buttons when you were a kid. You know the ones where if you change the angle you can see an eye wink, or skeleton walk. Well, that technology has finally been updated for the 21st century by Extreme Vision and its called lenticular 3D. There's serious depth when you look at this cover straight on and then when you tilt it back and forth you see the Superman logo zoom out of the explosion right at you. If you're going to be at San Diego Comicon make sure to check out the cover flats they're giving away since this photo doesn't really do it justice. Rumor has it there's another super secret advance holographic prototype cover coming up from Harper (shhhhh). If the first step in selling a book is getting someone to pick it up, these books will sell like hotcakes. Actually, hotcakes aren't selling so well these days, so they'll sell like something that really sells well. Like Beer?

When I saw the job listing for an Editor at Orbit I was worried that my old pal Devi Pillai had gotten the axe. Turns out that's not the case; Orbit is actually planning on doubling the size of its list in the US over the next 3 years taking its title output to 70-80 per year by 2011 (and 10% for the next 3 years in the UK). And, according to publisher Tim Holman, "Hachette Australia will start to publish SFF titles under the Orbit imprint later this year."

At a time when some houses are cutting back on staff (I'm looking at you Houghton and Doubleday), Orbit is currently hiring an additional editor in the US, and will be making further appointments in due course. In the UK, Bella Pagan has been promoted to Commissioning Editor, and Marketing Executive Samantha Smith has taken on a number of editorial responsibilities. Darren Turpin has also joined the imprint as an additional Marketing Executive, focusing on online marketing campaigns. Orbit's latest national bestseller is Matter by Iain M. Banks which is number one on the Locus hardcover list this month

After reading a recent GalleyCat post that described In the Belly of the Beast, this year's Lexus Original Fiction Series project, as "a matter of branding gone wrong," Mark Haskell Smith (left), who came up with the concept for the serial novel and recruited the nine authors who will be taking part, emailed me suggesting that evaluation was unfair. "Is it more or less wrong than Spike Lee directing a film for Nokia?" Smith asked rhetorically. "Is it more or less wrong than Oprah Winfrey choosing a novel for her show... or Starbucks picking a book to sell in their stores?"

(Full disclosure: Not only am I friendly with Smith, but Channel V Media, which represents Story Worldwide, the "brand storytelling" firm behind Lexus's print and online magazines, is also my PR firm.)

"Lexus did a focus group," Smith says of the serial's origins. "Lexus owners listed travel, food, and reading as their top three leisure activities. So Lexus decided to add some fiction to their magazine... The project was undertaken in the spirit of fun. The writers got to do, basically, whatever they wanted, within minimal guidelines. The guidelines were more about sex, drugs, and drunk driving than selling the vehicle. So here's an opportunity for nine writers to get their writing, bios, and info about their novels out to a million readers. Is that a sellout or a clever use of new media—specialty publishing—to reach readers and maybe sell some books?"

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To promote What Rhymes With Bastard?, a memoir scheduled for late-summer publication, MacAdam/Cage will be handing out CDs at BookExpo America with some original songs written by the author, Linda Robertson, in her capacity as the accordionist for Cotton Candy Cabaret, a San Francisco-based cabaret act. The lyrics to "Heavy Petting in the Great Outdoors," the track that was emailed to me as an advance preview, make it completely NSFW, so we won't be showing that off to you, but you can download some songs from their website. Or, visit their the band's MySpace page, which features a streaming version of "No Butts," another slightly risqué song slated to appear on the CD.

Naturally, an extract from the memoir printed in the Sunday Times in late March (the book's already out in the U.K.) has NSFW bits in it, too. Boy, the reading tour is going to be fun.

(If anybody else is planning to give stuff away besides the usual galleys and book bags, and wants to give us a sneak peek, that'd be cool.)

The Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature has announced a new round of literary all-stars who have committed to spending up to four days in a luxury hotel in Dubai to talk about their books. Frank McCourt, Margaret Atwood, Louis de Bernieres, Karin Slaughter, Kate Mosse, Penny Vincenzi, and Kate Adie will be joining authors like Paolo Coelho and Lynne Truss who were on the roster when EAIFL organizers announced themselves to the international publishing community at the London Book Fair last month.

"I cannot imagine a more vibrant and alive city to host a festival of literature," says festival director Isobel Abulhoul, who is also the co-owner of Magrudy's, an independent bookstore in Dubai. In addition to bringing in a bumper crop of international writers, the festival appears to be explicitly designed to call attention to the literary culture of the United Arab Emirates—both to spotlight significant Arab authors and to emphasize the status of Dubai as a place where people love to read (setting aside the censorship issues that prevent Magrudy's from stocking, say, "anti-religious" books like The God Delusion).

Stephanie Murg of UnBeige, mediabistro.com's design blog, spotlights Taschen's new collection of circus art, which features "over 900 color and black-and-white illustrations, including photographs by everyone from Matthew Brady and Walker Evans to Lisette Model and, get this, Charles and Ray Eames."

And, as the above illustration demonstrates, lots of posters.

If you thought Sloane Crosley's publicist Melissa Broder had it pretty weird, imagine being God's publicist. Matt Staggs is the "humble servant and messenger of God," aka Pushcart Prize winner Thomas M. Disch who declared himself to be God in 2005. With the July publication of Disch's first novel in nine years The Word of God coming up from Tachyon, he's begun answering questions from the faithful on live journal.

"As God's publicist, I can tell you that I have to be on my "A" game." Says Staggs. " If you've read any of God's prior bestselling works (particularly the Old Testament), you know that he can be a tough and demanding client. I'm hoping that he'll be giving me a staff that turns into a snake, or at least some good pull-quotes with which I can woo the media. Either would be sufficient!"

So, I emailed Paul Di Filippo this morning, any "what hath I wrought?" feelings after reading this morning's NY Times feature on steampunk? The Times credits the science fiction author with naming the subculture, which has spread from literature to fashion, via a collection of novellas published in 1995, which you should totally track down and read. "Now I have to watch for assassins sent by K.W. Jeter, actual coiner of the term," he quipped. It's true: Jeter coined the term back in 1987 to describe a wave of sci-fi novels with Victorian-era settings, among which one might recommend, off the top of one's head, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates. (If you've got more recommendations, don't keep them to yourself.)

Beyond that, Di Filippo asks, "Where's my gold-plated, coal-powered Orgasmatron?" Good question. After reading the article, mine is: Is anybody really watching the film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is pretty godawful, or are they heading straight for the comic book?

(photo: Robert Wright/NYT)