Powells.com announces the winners of its "Decade of Reading" essay contest, which solicited writings about readers' most memorable reading experiences. Unsurprisingly, inner city school teachers, suicide survivors, and adopted mothers of drug-addicted babies sweep the prize.

• NBC announces plans to turn The 9/11 Commission Report into a miniseries.
• Dan Brown's publisher, Stephen Rubin, accidentally reveals the name of Brown's next novel, The Solomon Key.
• Brian Morton's A Window Across the River (Harcourt, $13) gets picked by author Sue Miller for the Today Show's book club.

PRWeek talks to Tracy van Straaten (director of publicity, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing) about Simon Spotlight Entertainment (SSE), S&S's "pop culture-laden imprint."

Q. What's your reaction if a reporter doesn't get what SSE is trying to do or draws a parallel to the death of the novel?
A. I don't think it's worth worrying about. I've actually been delighted by how everyone seems to get SSE immediately. There have been very few journalists who haven't. No one [at SSE] is suggesting that there's no room for literary fiction. No one is suggesting that people in this age group are not reading those things. But since people's interests have been diverted by multimedia, tastes change and taste evolve. These are books that can get some of those more reluctant or less obvious readers to pick up a book. If it gets them into the bookstore, they may pick up something else while they're there. We've found the opportunity is tremendous in specialty sales outlets. A lot of people in this demographic aren't going into bookstore. He's Just Not That Into You is being sold at Urban Outfitters, and the poker book is being sold at Restoration Hardware. If that attracts a different audience, then great. It's not so much replacing existing books, its expanding potential readers.

Some quick thoughts: 1. I love how the Q. implies a reporter's critique could only be based on "not getting" SSE. 2. I wouldn't charge SSE with bringing about the "death of the novel" (perhaps bringing about the "parallel to the death of the novel," though -- whatever that phrasing means), but I'd like to note that Tracy refers to literary fiction as "those things." 3. Who knew a bookstore could morph so quickly into Urban Outfitters. It's like a Q & A with CG.

Previously on GC:

• Simon Says to Read, 9.21.04
• Account Book, 9.29.04
• Account Book, 10.5.04

• "Every self-respecting tribe has its fertility dance and, in the literary world, this takes place around the temple of annual book prizes," writes Alan Riding in the International Herald Tribune.

  Yet while the laureates come away with applause and a check, the true promoters and beneficiaries of this ritual are others. With book sales falling almost everywhere, the publishing industry desperately needs these prizes to create an aura of excitement around the faltering world of fiction.
  
  ...In reality the prize winners are often just bit players whose names may be soon forgotten. What lives on is the prize and the media attention it garners.

  • Other Awards News: Germany's top literature prize, the Georg-Buechner Prize, goes to Wilhelm Genazino, author of An Umbrella for This Day and A Woman, a Flat, a Novel.
  
  
• According to MSNBC's "The Scoop," Siegfried and Roy (whose hospitalization, judging by the photo, turned him into a goateed David Gest) "are secretly shopping around their joint memoir."

  "They're meeting with top publishers in the coming weeks," says one insider. "It's all very hush-hush, but apparently, they're going to tell everything about their private and professional lives. We're very excited about it."
  
  The source says the bidding will probably be in the seven-figure range.

  Gross.
  
  
• While most writers are pulling for Kerry, Random House is giving journalist Gene Stone a good reason to vote for Bush: Stone's The Bush Survival Bible: 250 Ways to Make It Through the Next Four Years Without Misunderestimating the Dangers Ahead and Other Subliminable Strategeries will only hit stores if Kerry loses (second item).

  Random House Editor in Chief Jonathan Karp says that the unusual publishing arrangement calls for Stone to get paid either way, though he will receive less money if the book does not get published -- i.e. if Kerry wins -- than if it does. The same is true, of course, for the house, which cannot make money on a book it doesn't publish.
  
  Still, Karp says, Random House was happy to take the financial risk. "We believe publishers have a moral responsibily to prepare readers for calamitous events," he says.

• Slate's "in other magazines" wrap-up gives GC something to look forward to in this weekend's NY Times Magazine:

  In time for the release of his new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, a profile of Tom Wolfe addresses the usual "biographical blah-dee-blah," but also explores his struggles with depression, his susceptibility to procrastination, and his contentious relationships with John Updike, John Irving, and Norman Mailer. After their criticism of his previous book, A Man in Full, Wolfe decried, "they've wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them."

It's the season of colds, and cold-hearted brothers.

From the London Times:

The younger brother of Gerhard Schroder is set to make a laughing stock out of the German Chancellor by publishing embarrassing stories about their early life together -- on paper handkerchiefs to be sold across the country.

Lothar Vosseler, a 57-year-old unemployed heating engineer, claims that he bears no grudge against his half-brother. But his strange initiative -- cooked up with Ernest Buck, a Berlin businessman -- is sure to stir up a family feud.

The so-called "handkerchief newspaper" has been devised to dodge the privacy laws and potential injunctions. Herr Schroder has already gone to court to muzzle magazines who claim that he dyes his hair and to block the publication of pictures of his family.

The new scheme, however, will be unstoppable in the courts and 500,000 packets of tissue handkerchiefs will be distributed among 50,000 kiosks and newspaper stands.

... "Previously unknown human weaknesses and character flaws of the Chancellor will be revealed by Lothar Vosseler," said Herr Buck, who describes their venture as a new form of disseminating satire.

"The dramatically different biographies of these unequal brothers will, believe me, throw up splendid anecdotes."

According to the Times, Herr Vosseler's (hardback) memoir, The Chancellor, Unfortunately My Brother, And I, launches in December.

And if you're not already picturing a Disney villian, rubbing bony hands together in delight, the article's final quote requires, at the very least, to be read in an evil German accent:

"My reluctant position of Chancellor-brother has become a personal yoke for me. My bank account is empty and now I want to draw on my biographical capital," Herr Vosseler said. "You could call it 'Chancellor-brother damages', a kind of compensation fund. I am sure Gerhard won't begrudge me that."

The Guardian looks at this new thing called "fan fiction," and applauds its ability to induce psychological and cultural regression:

Sometimes when I listen to my four-year-old daughter playing, I am reminded of the vivid, muddled contours of a fantasy landscape that you learn to distance yourself from as an older reader ... The writers of fan fiction recapture that childish bravado, those easy movements from one narrative to another and in and out of real life. As they reweave these stories they remind us that the boundary of the published book, and the control exerted by the individual author over a tale, is a relatively recent phenomenon for art, both in history and in our individual lives.

Indeed, when it comes to fan fiction, the internet is giving us back something like an oral society, in which people can retell the stories that are most important to them and, in so doing, change them. For all the dross and smut they produce, these communities in which readers become writers, fans become creators and old tales become new, also give out blasts of energy. And they remind us that the power of these fantasy worlds are not built just on profit and loss, but on imagination responding to imagination.

Today's Q:

When did reviewers finally give up on the pretense of writing book reviews, not book reports?