We read a short sample of the novel that shows Brown’s hero Robert Langdon dreaming about “a writhing pair of legs, which protruded upside down from the earth, apparently belonging to some poor soul who had been buried headfirst to his waist.”

This is clearly a reference to Inferno, Dante Alighieri‘s 14th century epic poem that inspired the new book. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can download a free copy of the Inferno complete with annotations. Read the relevant section of the poem below…

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You can download two free eBooks by J.F. Penn to play an online game created by Kobo. The winner gets $5,000 and an eReader signed by Brown himself. AppNewser has all the details:

Kobo has created an augmented reality game to promote eReading. The game is called The Descent and is inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Dan Brown’s upcoming book Inferno and the works of the self-published author J.F. Penn, which are themed around Dante’s Inferno and the nine circles of hell. The promotion encourages readers to download and read two free eBooks by Penn – Sins of Temptation and Sins of Violence (both of which are Kobo exclusives)– in order to look for clues to crack the code of the online game. The author’s third book in the series, Sins of Treachery, comes out in September.

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For your weekend reading pleasure, here are our top stories of the week.

They included secrets from Dan Brown‘s upcoming book, books that made us cry, a publishing industry flowchart (embedded above).

1. Books That Made Us Cry

2.  How Many Copies Make a Literary Bestseller?

3. Using Your Kindle as a Print Bookmark

4. Publishing Industry Flowchart

5. Free Sites to Promote Your Book

6. What Writers Need To Know About Tumblr

7. Neil Gaiman Shares ‘Secret Freelancer Knowledge’

8. Cracking Dan Brown’s Inferno Code

9. Successful Query Letters for Literary Agents

10. Amazon Opens Literary Imprint Called ‘Little A’

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The book will include the prologue and first chapter of Inferno, Brown’s upcoming novel. Follow these links to download: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, Sony Reader, Apple iBookstore and Kobo. Brown also revealed his only U.S. appearance to support the book:

Doubleday also announces today that Mr. Brown will speak at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center on May 15 at 7:30 pm. The talk will be his only U.S. appearance, and Doubleday is providing a live stream to bookstores and libraries across the country. To date, 150 outlets have signed on to share the event with their communities. Tickets go on-sale today through the Lincoln Center Box office and [at this link].

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For years, libraries around the country have offered patrons a “blind date with a book.” They wrapped a book in brown paper to hide its true identity, offering a coy description of its contents. Like any good blind date, you have to give the mystery book a try.

We’ve adapted the concept for our digital reading audience, creating blind date descriptions for five free and classic digital books below. Over at AppNewser, you can take a blind date with a free app.

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Megabestselling author Dan Brown will return with a new novel on May 14th. Inferno will revolve around Dante Alighieri‘s epic poem, Inferno. You can download a free illustrated eBook copy of Inferno.

Like The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code, the book will feature the adventures of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group will print four million copies initially.

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Here is an imaginary drunk text from Stein: “I am wasted or have been drinking since 3 or have wasted since this drinking 3 one wasted since drinking. Srsly, I’m messed up. Can you come get me?”

Follow this link to check out her whole series, which includes the imagine drunk texts of William Wordsworth, John Cheever and Dan Brown.

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This week’s Beyond the Book podcast from Copyright Clearance Center featured University of Cambridge Sociology professor, John B. Thompson. During the long interview, Thompson described a “winner-takes-more market” where mega-hits by Dan Brown or Stieg Larsson dominate.

Thompson explained: “[I]t’s like a drug. You become addicted to it and your business becomes focused on it because most of the large publishing houses are very much frontlist-driven houses. That is, the frontlist accounts for perhaps 60 to 70 percent of their revenues and the backlist only 30 to 40 percent of their revenues, so they have to reinvent themselves – or 60 to 70 percent of themselves – every year, and that means they have to find more big books. So it becomes like a treadmill. They become very fixed on the search for and publication of these big books.”

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Yet Patterson has not gone without criticisms. His stable of co-writers, his non-literary style of writing and his dominance of every genre have all been fair game. In this GalleyCat contributor’s interview with Patterson, he responded to those critics. He also discussed the secret to his success and his advice for aspiring authors.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview: “My success revolves around the fact that I am fairly analytical, logical, have a pretty good IQ but I’ve got street smarts too. You know, a lot of people who have nice IQ’s are just dumb as a brick when it comes to thinking about how other people think and what they might like and how to act in public and things like that. I think I have, you know, gifts involved of those areas. I mean, if I am writing a story that kids are supposed to not want to put down, if I don’t feel it, then I don’t think kids will feel it. If I don’t think that the pages are moving in the story and the characters aren’t involving, then I’m going to assume that the people reading it won’t.”

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Counting more than 100,000 votes, NPR Books has assembled a list of Killer Thrillers, readers’ picks for the top 100 thrillers of all time.

Surprisingly, recent bestsellers like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown were topped by a serial killer classic. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris took first place on the thriller list.

Here’s more from the site: “Who is the NPR audience’s favorite thriller writer? It’s the King, of course — Stephen King, who landed six titles in the top 100. Lee Child comes next, with four winning books. And, at three titles each, Michael Crichton, Dennis Lehane and Stieg Larsson tie for third.”

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Here at GalleyCat Reviews, we are obsessed with the art of underlining passages in digital books.

After months of domination by William P. Young, Dan Brown, and the Bible, the hardboiled work of Stieg Larsson has finally cracked the top five on Amazon’s Most Highlighted Books of All Time List. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo unseated Malcolm Gladwell, rising to #4 on the list.

This milestone comes on the heels of news that Larsson has joined Amazon’s new “Kindle Million Club”–selling one million books on Amazon’s device. Fans of Larsson have highlighted some fascinating quotes. 171 Kindle users have already underlined this sentence: “He surprised himself with this sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.”

Back in April, Amazon launched a “Popular Highlights” section that showcases the book passages underlined by Kindle readers–a 21st Century twist on literary quotation. Check out more strangely popular passages from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo below.

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I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Memoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Today the web-based “I Write Like” game distracted the online literary and publishing set. Created by Coding Robots and the journal-writing software Memoires, the program measures your prose against famous writers.

You just cut and paste a sample piece of text to play the game. According to the program, this GalleyCat editor writes like Dan Brown in blog post and Believer stories. However, when writing in the first person, the program compares our writing to Chuck Palahniuk.

Who do you write like? Share your reactions in the comments section–we’d love to get a cross-section of the literary influences in the audience. (Via Edward Champion)

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Here’s an excerpt from the blurb: “Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity.”

In the comments section, the Guardian urged reader to top the quote with even more flowery language. However, readers must write the blurb for Dan Brown‘s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. Follow this link to join the summer fun.

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So far, the list has been dominated by bestselling books: The Shack by William P. Young, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.

Here’s more about the program: “AmazonKindle also introduces a “Popular Highlights” feature that identifies the passages that are most highlighted by the millions of Kindle customers. We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people.”

After the jump, check out the Most Underlined Passage of All Time (at least since Amazon launched the program).

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This morning the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) broke world records for smashing together elementary particles at high levels of energy–a physics project that has inspired a generation of authors with doomsday scenarios.

That photo (via CERN) shows scientists reacting to the experiment. To celebrate, GalleyCat Reviews rounded up reviews of books that use the Large Hadron Collider as plot device. Most famously, novelist Dan Brown wrote an apocalyptic scenario in Angels and Demons.

Here’s Janet Maslin‘s breathless review: “With ‘Angels and Demons,’ Mr. Brown introduced Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of art history and religious symbology who is loaded with ‘what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal.’ No wonder: the new book finds the enormously likable Langdon pondering antimatter, the big-bang theory, the cult of the Illuminati and a threat to the Vatican, among other things.”

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