Authors

Novelist Jennifer Egan will publish a complete science fiction story on The New Yorker Fiction Twitter feed over the next few nights.

The New York Observer reported that the experiment will begin tonight at 8 p.m. ET. Egan (pictured)  has experimented in her fiction before, writing a short story disguised as a list and publishing PowerPoint fiction for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Back in 2009, Electric Literature performed a similar experiment with novelist Rick Moody.

Here’s more from the author: “This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea. I wrote these bulletins by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page. The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now ‘Black Box.’” (Link via MB Newsfeed; image via Marion Ettlinger)

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

British nutritionist Venice A. Fulton has scored a 7-figure book deal with Grand Central Publishing for his diet book Six Weeks to OMG. The book first hit the scene as a self-published work.

In the book, Fulton shares his diet tricks, which he has used in his work as a celebrity trainer. His ideas are somewhat controversial. For example, he suggests skipping breakfast and not eating broccoli.

Responding to a doctor’s criticism of his approach, Venice blogged: “In simple terms, doctors are the mechanics who patch things up when they go wrong.  I’m extremely grateful for the job they do, and have fond memories of doctors visiting me as a child, and making me better again.  But in terms of preventative advice, they can’t be trusted.  In terms of cutting-edge advice, they’re even more behind the times.”

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The Zodiac killer, a serial killer who claimed in letters to newspapers to have murdered dozens of people back in the 1970s, has been the subject of a number of books and films.

The latest is a book called The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up written by a former California Highway Patrol officer named Lyndon Lafferty.

According to the book’s website, the team of investigators working on the case discovered the killer back in 1971.

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Novelist Thomas Steinbeck received a mountain of letters from his father, John Steinbeck. Over at The Hairpin, the son of the late Nobel Prize winning author talked about what he learned from these letters.

Follow this link to read a letter Steinbeck wrote about relationship advice. Thomas has written a number of books, most recently The Silver Lotus. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

my father sent me this very long letter, and he had very tiny handwriting — he wrote by hand — and it was like an 18-page letter. It took me a week to decipher this thing, because of his handwriting, primarily. And when I got to the very end of it, I noticed at the very bottom, he said, “Son, I want to apologize. I would’ve sent you a note but I didn’t have the time!”

Meaning, that ultimately, the greatest amount of time in all writing is spent editing. My father said there’s only one trick to writing, and that’s not writing, that’s writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. Like sculpture. I mean, the first thing off the top of your head isn’t the most brilliant thing you ever thought of. And then when you’re writing about it, when you want others to understand what you’re still talking about, then it really requires that you edit yourself really, really well, so that other people can comprehend it.

Artcurial will auction off two rare handwritten pages from an early draft of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The manuscript includes the story of an earthling obsessed with a crossword puzzle, a strange tale ultimately cut from the final edition of the book.

Follow this link to read a translation of the unpublished pages. Scribbled on onionskin paper, the draft was written around 1941. A few years later, de Saint-Exupery disappeared while flying a military mission in North Africa. Here’s more about the manuscript:

The second leaf of the manuscript is completely original. The petite figure has just arrived on Earth and meets the first person on the planet, “perhaps an ambassador of the human spirit.” The man is very busy; He is looking for a six-letter word that means “gargling.” This crossword enthusiast reminds one of the businessman that the Little Prince meets in the published version: Both are absorbed by abstract thoughts, letters, or numbers, and both are perturbed by this curious little character asking constant questions. Just as the businessman is too busy calculating the number of these “little golden objects that set lazy men to idle dreaming” – the stars! -, the crossword enthusiast has little time to devote to his visitor: “I am very busy [...]. I have been working for three days without success. I am looking for a six-letter word that starts with G that means ‘gargling’.” (Via Reddit)

The John Updike Society has finalized a contract to purchase John Updike‘s home for $200,000.

Located in the Pennsylvania town of Shillington, Updike lived in the home for thirteen years as a child. John Updike Society president James Plath announced that the organization plans to make the house a historic site and convert it into an operational museum.

Here’s more from Reading Eagle: “Out of respect for the residential neighborhood, Plath said, he expects the historic site to be open only by appointment and not list regular hours. Plath said he has researched the operations of similar historic sites that were once authors’ homes, including the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Ga., and the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Ala.”

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Journalist Edward Klein has a new unauthorized book out about president Barack Obama in which he claims that former president Bill Clinton called Obama an ‘amateur.’

The book, which is called Amateur, claims that Bill thinks so little of the current president that he encouraged Hillary to run against Obama in this year’s presidential election. The New York Post reports:

according to the book, Bill Clinton unloaded on Obama and pressed Hillary to run against her boss during a gathering in the ex-president’s home office in Chappaqua last August that included longtime friends, Klein said. ‘The economy’s a mess, it’s dead flat. America has lost its Triple-A rating . . . You know better than Obama does,’ Bill said. (Via Mediate).

Percy Jackson series author Rick Riordan plans to work on a new series inspired by Norse mythology, but his fans will have to wait for the series.

According to Courier Press, Riordan will be spending next year working exclusively on book four of The Heroes of Olympus series. The third installment, The Mark of Athena, will be released in October. Here’s more from the article:

Writing about Norse mythology “represents a return to my roots as a reader,” he added, noting that his eighth-grade teacher got him interested in mythology by pointing out that the “Lord of the Rings” books — Riordan’s favorites at the time — were based on Norse mythology.”

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Author Michele Rosenthal recently published her memoir, Before the World Intruded: Conquering the Past and Creating the Future. The book recounts the twenty-four years she spent struggling with undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and her subsequent healing. In celebration of the book release, Rosenthal (pictured, via) has launched Project Give Back.

Those who buy Rosenthal’s book before May 31st can sign up to receive free gifts from Project Give Back. She sought out trauma counselors and other professionals to donate $1,900 worth of free gifts including eBooks, videos, counseling sessions, therapeutic memberships and more. She will also be raffling off nearly $6,500 in special gifts.

Here’s more about Project Give Back: “The driving principle behind everything I do is the idea that we don’t heal in isolation; we heal in community…As a post-trauma coach, host of a radio talk show and the founder of www.healmyptsd.com, I hear from survivors of all types of traumas, from combat to domestic violence to sexual assault, child abuse, accidents and illnesses. I often hear that treatment costs more than they can afford. PROJECT GIVE BACK was born as a way to unify the professional trauma community and allow survivors to access products and experiences that may help them move toward recovery.”

Bestselling novelist Paulo Coelho has convinced HarperCollins to sell many of his eBooks for 99-cents in the United States and Canada. The sale prices are now in effect at Amazon, iTunes
and Barnes & Noble.

The author could not predict how long the sale would last, but hopes to set the industry standard. In a blog post, Coelho explained that he hoped to make his digital books cost as much as a song in iTunes. The author helpfully did the book-buying math for his readers, revealing that purchasing all his discounted books will cost $10.89 versus $74.19 at regular prices.  Check it out:

One of my US publishers, HarperCollins, following a conversation with my agent Monica Antunes at the London Book Fair 2012, have decided to reduce the price of all my ebook titles (except The Alchemist) to 0.99 USD. Which means a book now costs less than a cup of coffee! This is a crucial decision for me. For years I have been advocating that free content is not a threat to the book business. In lowering the price of a book and equaling it to the price of a song in iTunes, the reader will be encouraged to pay for it, instead of downloading it for free. The email sent by Harper does not specify for how long the promotion will last.