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‘Tiger Eyes’ Official Trailer Released

An official trailer for the Tiger Eyes film adaptation has been released. The trailer includes a first look at Willa Holland as Davey and Tatanka Means as Wolf.

We’ve embedded the video above–what do you think?

According to The Hollywood ReporterTiger Eyes will be the first time a Judy Blume title has been adapted into a feature film. Lawrence Blume, Judy’s son, directed this project. He worked on writing the screenplay with his mother.

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Shakespeare Apps Coming for Students

Simon & Schuster and Folger Shakespeare Library will release a set of interactive apps aimed at helping students explore the work of William Shakespeare.

AppNewser has more about the upcoming apps:

Coming this November, the joint effort will release app versions of HamletOthelloMacbethRomeo & Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They will continue to release plays thereafter until the entire collection is available. The app versions will include audio recordings, videos and photos, which are designed to help teach the texts. This includes audio performances produced at the Folger Theatre, as well as expert commentary from Shakespeare scholars. The apps will also have social networking reading tools on a private network so that teachers and students can take digital notes and share them with each other within the networked text.

If you are looking for un-interactive versions of these famous plays, follow the links below to download free copies of Shakespeare’s most popular works on Project Gutenberg.

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Soman Chainani’s The School for Good and Evil Acquired by Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures acquired the rights to Soman Chainani‘s The School for Good and Evil in a seven-figure deal.

The newly released novel is the first installment in epic fantasy trilogy published by HarperCollins.  Slated for three films, Jane Startz will produce and Chainani will write the script with Malia Scotch-MarmoDeadline Hollywood had the scoop:

Deadline revealed last Thursday that the Oz The Great And Powerful producer had partnered with Jane Startz Production to acquire movie rights to The School For Good And Evil. After a spirited auction, Universal Pictures won the property in a seven-figure deal for book and scriptwriting fees.

Elizabeth Warren Lands a Book Deal with Metropolitan Books

Senator Elizabeth Warren will publish a book about “how Washington is rigged against America’s middle class” with Henry Holt and Company’s Metropolitan Books imprint.

Publication is set for the spring of 2014. Robert Barnett of Williams & Connolly negotiated the deal with publisher Stephen Rubin. Editor at large John Sterling will edit. You can read her work on Twitter, where she has more than 82,000 followers. Here’s more from the release:

The main focus of the book, however, will be the conflict America now faces between giant institutions and the needs of everyday citizens. Senator Warren will bring her wide professional experience – as a Harvard law professor, head of the Congressional panel that tried to bring some oversight to the bank bailout, and assistant to the President for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – to outline how the American middle class can be strengthened. The book will discuss how powerful interests in Washington have rigged the system to benefit themselves and what actions must be taken at every level – from campaigns to legislation to government agencies – to level the playing field.

Lydia Davis Wins £60,000 Man Booker International Prize

Lydia Davis has won the fifth Man Booker International Prize, chosen from among nine finalists.

The announcement was made at Victoria and Albert Museum in London. We’ve included the complete list of finalists below. Here’s more from the official release:

 The Prize, worth £60,000, is awarded for an achievement in fiction on the world stage and Davis’s achievements are writ large despite often using startlingly few words (some of her longer stories only stretch to two or three pages). Her work has the brevity and precision of poetry. Sir Christopher Ricks, chairman of the judges, said her “writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations.”

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Kathleen Schmidt Joins Weinstein Books as Director of Publicity

Kathleen Schmidt will be the new publicity director of Weinstein Books. She will join the publisher (a Perseus Books Group and Weinstein Company partnership) on July 1.

Currently,  Schmidt runs her own publicity firm, KMS Public Relations–working with around 120 books a year. You can follow her work on Twitter. In the past, she served as director of publicity at Atria Books, director of publicity at Dutton and Gotham Books and a publicist at Pocket Books. Here’s more from the release:

At Weinstein Books, Kathleen will personally create and implement digital and traditional publicity campaigns for all hardcover, e-books, trade paper original and trade paper reprint titles on the list, and will work alongside Publishing Director Georgina Levitt and Editorial Director Amanda Murray.


Digital Tools for Crime Writers

Crime journalist Steve Lillebuen painted a complex and spooky picture of a killer in The Devil’s Cinema: The Untold Story Behind Mark Twitchell’s Kill Room.

We caught up with the journalist to find out what digital tools he used to build his book. Lillebuen explained how he used valuable tools like OCR software and the Wayback Machine to explore the killer’s life. We’ve embedded the complete interview below, but here’s an excerpt:

My advice, however, is to treat the Internet as just another tool and not abandon old research and journalism skills. You still have to get out there and have good contacts, speak to a lot of sources, ask them questions, door knock, be very patient, and be prepared to be yelled at. Nobody loves a police reporter, as Edna Buchanan liked to say. You’re prying into people’s lives during their most traumatic moment. You’re bound to face a lot of abuse. My book research ended up straddling both the digital and the real world. I spent a year interviewing the killer in prison. He didn’t have access to a computer and could rarely make phone calls, so he ended up sending me more than 350 pages of hand-written letters.

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Jamie Oliver Changes Publishers

Celebrity chef, author and Food Revolution host Jamie Oliver has jumped to HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint after working with Hyperion on earlier books.

Ecco will publish the first book in fall 2014 with another book coming one year later. The publisher did not reveal the subjects of the books. According to the release, the chef sold more than two million copies of 30-Minute Meals in the UK. Oliver had this statement about his change of publisher:

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have worked with such a supportive publisher in Hyperion but I am really excited about this new relationship.  It is an honor for me to join the company of the great chefs on Ecco’s roster.  Many of them are my friends and I look forward to this partnership.

How To Turn Your Twitter Page into a Book

Do you want to share your tweets with your grandchildren someday? Maybe you should make a book.

AppNewser has collected five different services that will turn your Twitter feed into a book. Check it out: 

Twournal: “Twournal allows you to create, buy and sell twitter books printed from your tweets. All Twournals have color covers, can include replies and photos from services such as Twitpic and Yfrog in color or black and white. You can choose a custom picture for your front cover. Select which tweets you want to start and end at. And you can add a dedication message to appear after your title.”

Most Searched Authors & Books on Google

This month, William Shakespeare is the most searched for author on Google and The Bible is the most searched for book. Below, we’ve posted the top ten most searched for authors on Google.

Google has started automatically updating monthly charts for the top trending books and the top trending authors on the search engine.  TNW has more about the new tool:

Today, Google releases a new and improved version of the product with new charts, updated monthly, of the most-searched people, places and things in more than 40 categories with the ability to filter by 11 countries. PR companies and their customers now have another metric to be highly aware of. Everything from business people through to cars are ranked for the world to see. Each category goes back to 2004.

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