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...

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.

In June, Avery will publish Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Faye Flam's book about "how the quest for sex has shaped the modern man," which is the latest entry in a field that's almost becoming a genre unto itself. Call it the "Mystery" section -- the fast-growing area of the bookstore devoted to books that have something to do with Neil Strauss's 2003 bestseller 'The Game.' Flam's book isn't another guide to seduction, though. Instead, she uses examples from throughout the natural kingdom -- from praying mantises to giant squid -- to explain how evolutionary science supports Strauss's tactics. Fun! Also, depressing. Also, seriously gross. For example, about those giant squid:

"The male uses his penis like a hypodermic needle, piercing the skin on the female's arms ... since the female has no vagina. Then, with hydraulic force, the male injects her with four-inch-long tadpole-shaped "spermatophores" ... the penis is about five feet long when flaccid. The end of the penis has a cartilaginous lance, the better for stabbing ... sometimes the female will bite off the male's penis or arms with her deadly beak. It may be that one or both sexes don't survive the encounter. If human males faced these sorts of hazards, it would seem perfectly understandable that they'd gather in pickup classes and related support seminars, there to boost one another's courage to approach the opposite sex."

Heretofore, I've known Jennifer Banash as one of the powers behind Iowa City indie Impetus Press, and though I've seen her novel, Hollywoodland, I have to admit that I was surprised by the news that she's also the author of The Elite, a YA series debuting next month set in "the most exclusive luxury apartment building on New York's Upper East Side."

Now I'm going to have that synth line stuck in my head for the rest of the afternoon.

In just under three minutes, Steven Pressfield sets the stage for his latest novel, Killing Rommel. In fact, you would barely be able to tell from this short film that the book—which ships this week—is fiction; everything about the presentation is grounded in the conventions of TV documentary... the visual flourish of Pressfield drawing a map of the theater of operations in the desert sands is a particularly nice touch.

But you can only put so much information across in three minutes, which is why there's an extended, 10-minute version of the film that goes deeper into Rommel's background and his tactics for desert warfare, along with more information about how the British army's Long Range Desert Group developed a counterstrategy that finally pushed the German army back, then goes on to reveal Rommel's eventual fate following his evacuation to Europe. This video actually hints at some interesting possibilities when it comes to using short films to promote both fiction and nonfiction titles. If a production company can create something like this out of stock footage and a remote location shoot, how much harder can it be to make a 22- or 23-minute version which, in addition to being podcastable, is ready for cable broadcast?

Obviously, this wouldn't work for every novel, or even every nonfiction book, and there's only so many titles that would command the level of investment required, but perhaps, for somebody reading this post right now, it's something worth thinking about.

(And, too, a 30-second trailer which is in some respects as much an ad for the longer videos as it is for the book.)

So I get a copy of Ron Paul's The Revolution in the mail from Grand Central earlier this week, and I say to myself: Wouldn't this have been much more helpful twelve months ago? Maybe even six? But then I check the Google News, and I find out Paul's still in it, if not necessarily to win it. Maybe this'll help guarantee him 15 minutes at the convention, who knows?

According to Wikipedia, Representative Paul is the author or co-author of 18 previous titles, most of them self-published through the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education. But I don't think they should count Ron Paul Speaks, which is really just a collection of quotes that two other guys compiled to cash in on the presidential candidate's growing popularity (as opposed to the book the candidate wrote himself to cash in on his growing popularity).

Seton Hall arsonists Joseph T. LePore and Sean Ryan were denied parole Monday afternoon, ensuring that they will serve more time on their sentences for starting a dormitory fire in January 2000 that killed 3 students and injured 58 others. Newark Star-Ledger feature reporter Robin Gaby Fisher was keeping an eye on the hearings—a series of articles she wrote for the paper about two of the victims, Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, became the basis of a book, After the Fire, which will be published by Little, Brown this summer. "I was worried about how Shawn and Alvaro would react if the boys who started the fire were released that quickly," she said when Andy Heidel asked about her reaction to the parole board's decision. "As much as Shawn and Alvaro are not, and have never been about seeking revenge, they do feel that Sean Ryan and Joseph LePore should be punished for all the pain they've caused. For all Shawn and Alvaro have suffered, and because they feel so passionately for the families of the boys who died, I think they would have been terribly hurt had the outcome of yesterday's parole hearing been different."

We also wondered what had originally drawn her to telling the story of Simons and Llanos's recovery. "When it was proposed to me by an editor, I knew immediately it had the potential to be the story of a career and that is exactly what it has turned out to be," she said. "I always said this was a story that was meant to be told. Everything fell into place quickly. You can't make up more compelling characters than Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos. You root for them through the whole book. The payoff for the reader is that they are so worth rooting for. They're so special."

(This photo of Fisher with Simons and Llanos was taken by Matt Rainey, whose photos for the original newspaper articles won the Pulitzer Prize.)

continued...

This one-minute trailer for The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter, a novella by M. David Hornbuckle, starts out with some interesting computer animation—the only jarring element is that while the man in the film is done up in a somewhat realistic style, the woman's facial features are much more cartoonish, and the effect is somewhat jarring. But a machinima book trailer is a great idea in principle—anybody else got one?

(Clarification: Although animator Peter Bernard goes by the handle "pbmachinima," this video's computer animation is actually built from scratch.)

Did you see the notice in the Publishers Marketplace deal lunch last week for Harry Brod (right) and Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice and the Jewish-American Way. The book, which Free Press will publish in the summer of 2010, is billed as explaining how "the history of comics is the history of America and the history of Jews in comics is the history of Jews in America."

At GalleyCat, we hold both those propositions to be true, and not just because of our longstanding admiration for Michael Chabon and David Hajdu. We've also got the expertise of veteran Marvel Comics editor (and mediabistro.com instructor) Danny Fingeroth, who published Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero just last fall. His PW interview (with fellow '80s Marvel Bullpenner Peter Sanderson) hits most of the book's thematic points, including his interest in universalizing the question—in Fingeroth's words, his history can be defined beyond the Jewish question as exploring "the sparks that are ignited when people struggle, consciously or unconsciously, with the balance between their individual and their group identities."

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what Prof. Brod—a philosopher whose previous work includes a consideration of Jewish masculinity, along with other men's studies issues—brings to this fertile discussion area.

Shortly before my fifteenth birthday, on a typical Saturday afternoon excursion to the (now defunct) WordsWorth bookstore in Harvard Square, I discovered a novel that, basically, permanently recalibrated my reading tastes: Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds. The time would come when I'd recognize the frenetic blend of comedy, fantasy, and action in Hong Kong's epic martial arts cinema, but in 1985 the adventures of Li Kao the sage and his peasant sidekick, Number Ten Ox, were like nothing I'd read before, and I was hooked. (The following summer, Big Trouble in Little China came out, and I'm pretty sure that it was reading Hughart that prepared me to love that film right away.)

You can actually find Bridge of Birds kicking around if you look hard enough, and I highly recommend you do, but turning up the two sequels gets a little trickier—apparently Eight Skilled Gentlemen was published so haphazardly hardly anyone, including me, could find it when it came out—but, thanks to the prodding of John Scalzi (yes, him again), Subterranean Press is producing a limited-edition omnibus of all three novels. It's not even St. Patrick's Day yet, and already I know what I want for Christmas.