"I'd been waiting for the manuscript to be sent back really, rejected. It was such a wonderful surprise," she added.

The Great Lie features 16-year-old Nick, the son of the late first Earl of Rikesby, who runs away with a troupe of travelling players who take him to London, where he comes to Marlowe's attention.

"I want to wait until I'm excited about the material again, and I'm excited about Edward, and that it's something that's motivating," she said. "Right now, it feels like homework. And when things feel like homework they go very, very slowly for me. So it's still not a 'It's not gonna happen!' I want to do it when I can do it right."

"For my seventh birthday I was given a boxed set of the Narnia Books by CS Lewis. The last of them, The Last Battle had the words 'Winner of the Carnegie Medal' on it. I did not know what the Carnegie Medal was, but I knew it was something important.

It was the first literary award I had ever heard of. And if the Narnia books had won it, then it had to be the most important literary award there ever was.

Somewhere deep inside me, but not too deep, a seven-year old version of me is amazed and delighted that he's written a book that was given the most important literary award there ever was. And nothing you can say about Bookers or Nobels or Pulitzers will convince him otherwise."

The unpublished "A Family Sketch" was a 64-page, handwritten manuscript that Twain wrote around 1896 or 1897 for Olivia "Susy" Clemens, who inspired some of his stories and even wrote her own biography of her father. The document also reminisced about his own childhood and was described as the missing chapter of his autobiography.

"What initially began as a tribute to his late -- and undisputed favorite -- daughter Susy thus devolved into a narrative that encompasses the whole of this family and friends as well as glimpses of incidents of his own childhood," auctioneer Sotheby's said in a statement.

In 1936, Ernest Hemingway was already a legend when he met Gellhorn, a novelist and one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th Century, in a local bar in Key West. Their tumultuous romance and subsequent 5-year marriage took them to the Spanish Civil War as Gellhorn stood toe-to-toe with the literary master, putting his famous bravado and iconic style to the test. Gellhorn's competitive nature inspired the novelist to pen one of its most famous novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The 55-year-old was previously nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999 for her novel The Poisonwood Bible.

The Lacuna centres on writer Harrison Shepherd, and his social-climbing mother Salome, who ends up mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Riviera.

The role leads to a job in Riviera's house, where Harrison makes himself useful to the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo and the exiled Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky.

"We wanted to make the Sorrento a cultural and social epicenter," she said. One offering is "Chamber vs. Chamber," which pairs, for example, an orchestral percussionist and a rock musician.

Among the other events there, Garry Wills has discussed his book, "Bomb Power," and two of the principal dancers of the Pacific Northwest Ballet shared stories of life behind the scenes at the ballet.

About a year ago, the Liberty Hotel in Boston started offering special events every night, including cooking demonstrations by its executive chef, art exhibitions featuring local artists, and fashion shows where models strutted though the lobby and up the escalators.

Lancashire took 16 of her novels, written over more than 50 years, and fed the text into a computer program. The computer then spit out data about the vocabulary of the works, such as the frequency of different words and the number of different words used in each text.

When Lancashire looked at the results for Christie's 73rd novel, written when she was 81 years old, he saw something strange. Her use of words like "thing," "anything," "something," "nothing" - terms that Lancashire classifies as "indefinite words" - spiked. At the same time, number of different words she used dropped by 20 percent. "That is astounding," says Lancashire, "that is one-fifth of her vocabulary lost."

Neil Blair, partner at the Christopher Little Agency (CLA) which represents Rowling, said the agency was "currently considering all the options and opportunities that this evolving space provides". The agency was "actively" looking, whereas previously it had just been "monitoring the developing area", he said.

Richard Charkin, executive director of Rowling's print publisher Bloomsbury, declined to comment on whether Bloomsbury was in discussions with the author on e-book plans, saying: "That's between us and CLA."

• Trailer Least Likely to Sell the Book: Sounds of Murder by Patricia Rockwell
• Best Performance by an Author: Head Case by Dennis Cass
• Most Annoying Performance by an Author: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Best Cameo: Zach Galifianakis, in Lowboy by John Wray
• Best Low Budget/Indie: I am in the Air Right Now by Kathryn Regina
• Best Big Budget/Big House: Going West by Maurice Gee
• Biggest Waste of Conglomerate Money: Level 26 by Anthony Zuiker
• Best Foreign Film Book Trailer: Etcetera and Otherwise: a Lurid Odyssey by Sean Stanley, illustrated by Kristi-ly Green
• Bloodiest Book Trailer of the Year: Killer by Dave Zeltserman
• Most Annoying Music: New Year's At the Pier by April Halprin Wayland

Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it's all free, and you read freely, you're not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you're like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.

One thing's for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he'll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had "hypnotised" him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.

Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist's final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.

The 25-year-old was in "floods of tears" as her hit single The Fear, scooped prizes for best song musically and lyrically, and most performed work.

"This song is so much about feeling so lost," she said, "it has made me feel quite found all of a sudden."

Paul Weller won a lifetime achievement award and Scottish singer Paolo Nutini took home best album.

The Kindle bestseller list has been used by publishers to gauge consumer behavior towards e-books, as well by consumers use to point them to titles. An executive at HarperCollins said she thinks Amazon is certainly doing the right thing by splitting the list, noting that consumers "want to know what books everyone is reading, and buying," and that a list which combines free downloads and books for sale doesn't deliver this information. When asked if she thought the separation of the lists might make promotional e-book giveaways less effective, she said it might.

In the case of his book "An Enemy of the State," an error occurred in the process of converting his book to Kindle format-the process inadvertently dropped the last three chapers before the epilogue. Readers complained to Amazon, and so it contacted Wilson to fix the Kindle version of his book.

"I've had goofs in my hardcovers in the past, but we were never able to fix them until the next printing or edition, and no way to get the changes to people who had already bought the book," says Wilson. This gaffe was fixed in a matter of days, he says.

Suspense authors Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol Higgins Clark are set to celebrate Mother's Day in high literary form -- by residing together on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Both women released mystery novels on April 13, with the elder Clark's "The Shadow of Your Smile," ranking No. 6 on the Times' Hardcover Fiction best sellers list on May 7. Her daughter's "Wrecked," the 13th in her series featuring private investigator Regan Reilly, ranked 28th on the same list.

In this time of Twitter feeds and self-designed Snapfish albums and personal YouTube channels, it's hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing. But it was very real. By contrast, to have a book legitimately produced by a publishing house in the 20th century was not just to have copies of your work bound between smart-looking covers. It was also metaphysical: you had been chosen, made intelligible and harmonious by editors and finally rendered eligible, thanks to the magic that turns a manuscript into a book, for canonization and immortality. You were no longer a kid with a spiral notebook and a sonnet cycle about Sixth Avenue; you were an author, and even if you never saw a dime in royalties, no one could ever dismiss you again as an oddball.

But times have changed, and radically. Last year, according to the Bowker bibliographic company, 764,448 titles were produced by self-publishers and so-called microniche publishers. (A microniche, I imagine, is a shade bigger than a self.) This is up an astonishing 181 percent from the previous year. Compare this enormous figure with the number of so-called traditional titles - books with the imprimatur of places like Random House - published that same year: a mere 288,355 (down from 289,729 the year before). Book publishing is simply becoming self-publishing.

Melville House is excited to announce the first annual Moby Awards for the year's best and worst book trailers, to be handed out in a formal, red carpet ceremony at The Griffin (50 Gansevoort Street in New York City's Meatpacking District) on Thursday, May 20, 2010. Awards will be presented for book trailers that were produced between April 2009 and April 2010, whether by authors, editors, big houses, or little indies. The event is open to all publishing and media professionals, authors, and their guests. Indie publisher Dennis Loy Johnson, founder of the venerable book blog MobyLives, will be the host, and acclaimed novelist John Wray, and other surprise celebrity guests, will open the envelopes to read out the winners and present them with their trophies.

• Best Big Budget Book Trailer (big houses, or more than $500)
• Best Low Budget Book Trailer (indie houses, or less than $500)
• Best Cameo in a Book Trailer
• Best Performance by an Author
• and the "Least Likely to Sell the Book" Trailer

The double-sided sheet of paper with notes written in felt marker and blue ink will go under the hammer at a sale in New York on 18 June. The lyric sheet also contains some corrections and some other notes penned in red ink.

The song is the final track on the band's 1967 Sgt Pepper album.

The impression given by Monroe's writing, he said, is that of a delicate, introspective person whose train of thought could veer all over the page.

"There is a certain melancholy tone throughout the book, and what is very beautiful in some of the notes is the way you see the association between ideas, even if they are quite scattered all over the page," said Comment, editor at Editions du Seuil.

"They go in all directions and it can be sometimes quite difficult to find order within the fragments," Comment told Reuters in an interview, adding that the writing bordered at times on self-psychoanalysis.

"In the 14 years we've been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn't stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn't some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle's customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn't mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We'll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we'll see what happens to it."

That's one of the not-so-fun parts of writing about zombies. I wanted to know what color dead bodies turn, and you've got Google and I'm looking at it with one eye and my head turned away because you don't know what's going to pop up. I didn't want to delve into that stuff too much, but I wanted the descriptions to have enough verisimilitude that you really buy that this is a dead body.

It's something that I understand. I grew up as a fan. I was a Star Trek fan. Years later when J.J. Abrams comes traipsing along and says that he's going to reimagine this thing that you loved from your youth, there's going to be some trepidation. Are they going to be respectful, or are they just going to trash it? I totally get where they're coming from. On the other hand, I would say that I hope our affection for Jane Austen comes through. That's why it was very important to me that the dedication of the book be "For Jane: We kid because we love." For me, that captures what I'm all about. I'm not doing this to flip Jane Austen the bird. I'm a guest in her home.

W.W. Norton is canceling its planned party for author Martin Stannard. The event, to celebrate the release of Muriel Spark: The Biography, was supposed to happen on Wednesday night in New York City. Now, with Stannard stuck in England, Norton, which was co-hosting with Sterling Lord, says the party's off. Similarly, Henry Holt has canceled its planned publication party and tour for John Banville, which was to promote the author's newest Benjamin Black novel, Elegy for April.

The first book -- about Obama's early life and his struggle to find a racial identity -- earned about $3.3 million in 2009. The second, a more policy-oriented book, brought in $2.3 million for the president and his family.

In 2008, the books together earned them $2.6 million.

CBS Corp's (CBS.N) Simon & Schuster and News Corp's (NWSA.O) HarperCollins will be allowed to set their own prices for e-books under their agreement with Amazon, the report said.

Amazon, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins did not respond to requests for comment.

"HBO is deeply saddened by the sudden loss of our dear friend and colleague David Mills. He was a gracious and humble man, and will be sorely missed by those who knew and loved him, as well as those who were aware of his immense talent."

• What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua? by Tara Jansen-Meyer (Mirror) - 30%
• Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A Yannes (Trafford) - 11%
• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton (Glenstrae)
• Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots by Ronald C Arkin (CRC Press)
• The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl and Marla Dubinsky (SLACK Inc).

The CBOE this month filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell stock for the first time after it completes a demutualization process that will convert the member-owned exchange into a stock-based company.

Members of the exchange, who own the company by virtue of their seat ownership, will vote in the first half of this year on whether to proceed with the initial public offering.

The practice usually falls under the marketing campaign for a TV show or movie. To get that ball rolling, the movie studio or production house usually hires an outside company specializing in social media marketing. That company, in turn, may hire freelance writers, or use its own in-house people to channel the character in question.

Some characters' tweets are quite responsive, but other updates can take weeks or even months of planning and approval from several parties, including the social media marketing company, the network and the individual show or movie producers.

Writers may charge a day rate of a few hundred bucks, we're told by sources familiar with these sorts of deals, or get a couple hundred per post, depending on the gig.

Berkeley will write the music, with the poet Craig Raine writing the libretto after McEwan himself decided not to.

According to Berkeley, however, McEwan will have a "creative input" into the production, set to premiere in 2013.

"We're going to have several meetings with him so he can feed into what we're doing," he told the BBC News website.

The former lawyer, whose best sellers include "The Firm" and "A Time To Kill", had previously held off selling his books electronically, expressing concern that e-books would wipe out traditional book stores and make it harder for new writers to succeed.

But beginning Tuesday, all Grisham's fiction and non-fiction books will be available through e-book retailers, publisher Random House said.

Signs and posters telling shoppers to bring their book group to the store have gone out from corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich., to Borders' 507 outposts, including 18 stores in the Chicago area, said Mary Davis, spokesman for the chain. Borders' Chicago flagship on North Michigan Avenue, which is slated to close next year, already has hosted a few private book clubs in its third-floor event space.

"We're encouraging stores to reach out to the public to say, 'We're here,'" Davis said. "It's a way to drive traffic to the stores."

While he predicted there will be fewer bookstores in the future, he said bookstores will never go away, agreeing with "interviewer" David Young of Hachette Book Group that bookstores are where bestsellers are made, particularly for books that are put in the front of the store.

Part of the hate accruing to Dave Eggers is undoubtedly due to crab-bucket syndrome, which is when there are a lot of rivals, e.g., writers who are struggling after success in the form of TED prizes and screenplay commissions, and then one of them actually succeeds, and the rest of his fellow-strivers and former comrades attempt to yank him back down again. In the case of Eggers this is commonly depicted as not just envy, but more like a sense that the litterati just ought to have a better representative. Better, somehow, in some way, than this seemingly self-promoting impresario.

As well, a great divide opened between youngs and olds on the issue of Eggers when Where the Wild Things Are finally emerged. Us olds don't just detest twee, childish sentimentality. We would douse it in kerosene and throw a match on it, if we could.

Rowling writes on her website, "You won't be hearing from me often I am afraid, as pen and paper is my priority at the moment."

The movies nominated for the screenplay award are In the Loop (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci & Tony Roche), District 9 (Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell), Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire (Geoffrey Fletcher), An Education (Nick Hornby) and Up In The Air (Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner).

"It's my story, and at some point, it does need to be told. That point is getting closer, I think," he told reporters at Emory University in Atlanta, where an exhibition of his personal correspondence, notebooks, photographs, drawings and manuscripts is set to open on Friday. "When [the archive material] was in cardboard boxes and dead computers, it would have been very, very difficult, but now it's all organised," he said.

Last year marked 20 years since the Iranian leader called for Rushdie's execution, saying that his novel The Satanic Verses insulted Islam, Mohammed and the Qur'an. The edict, which followed street protests and book burnings across the Muslim world, forced Rushdie to go into hiding under police protection for almost 10 years.

"Since children's books is a completely different area of publishing than adult, and since John had never experienced any publishing in the children's area, we went out and spoke to a very, very small number of people we felt were particularly good at children's books," said Gernert, adding that Random House, Grisham's adult publisher, was in the mix. "We tried to figure out who had the vision for launching Theo that most matched John's, and it ended up being Penguin and Don Weisberg."

Jacobs' family members filed a lawsuit last June, claiming Rowling's 2000 book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire steals segments of the writer's novel The Adventures of Willy the Wizard - No 1 Livid Land. Rowling was named as a defendant in the lawsuit on Wednesday after the trustee of Jacobs' estate, Paul Allen, realised the time limit to sue the writer had not run out.

But Rowling has moved quickly to slam the accusation, insisting she has never even read Jacobs' book and will be applying to have the claim dismissed immediately. In a statement, she says: "The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first accusation by those connected to the author's estate in 2004; I have certainly never read the book.

"The claims that are made are not only unfounded but absurd and I am disappointed that I, and my U.K. publisher Bloomsbury, are put in a position to have to defend ourselves. We will be applying to the court immediately for a ruling that the claim is without merit and should therefore be dismissed without delay."

[A]ccording to at least three people with knowledge of the discussions, who spoke anonymously because of the confidentiality of the talks, Apple inserted provisions requiring publishers to discount e-book prices on best sellers -- so that $12.99-to-$14.99 range was merely a ceiling; prices for some titles could be lower, even as low as Amazon's $9.99. Essentially, Apple wants the flexibility to offer lower prices for the hottest books, those on one of the New York Times best-seller lists, which are heavily discounted in bookstores and on rival retail sites. So, for example, a book that started at $14.99 would drop to $12.99 or less once it hit the best-seller lists.

Moreover, for books where publishers offer comparable hardcover editions at a price below the typical $26, Apple wanted e-book prices to reflect the cheaper hardcover prices. These books might be priced much lower than $12.99, even if they did not hit the best-seller list.

caution to writers: don't expect that because you write a novel that becomes an Oscar-nominated film that you'll be invited to the Oscars

*****

Novelists are like oil in H'wood: they drill us, pipeline us, pump us and then burn us.

*****

sincerely wishes Up in the Air the best at the Oscars, all other matters aside, because art is art and the movie is art, he thinks

"The Academy has a process that we are following and we are respectfully waiting for them to allocate additional tickets. Of course, Walter Kirn is on our wish list for seats, as are producers and executive producers of our film who do not have seats yet."

"It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn't have time to deal with - like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake's brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that," Landau explained.

Although Cameron has extensive writing credentials, including the screenplays for everything from the first two "Terminator" films to "Titanic," the "Avatar" prequel would mark his debut as a novelist.

"I don't think Jim has ever written a novel before, but his first step of writing a script is often in a novella format," Landau said. "So this is just expanding that, and I think that he'll be very adept at it."

Roger Ebert can't remember the last thing he ate. He can't remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn't happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory - it wasn't as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz's ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren't they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.

Had he remained in the racing world as a trainer or thoroughbred expert after retiring from riding in 1957, Dick Francis would have been remembered as one of the most successful jockeys of his era.

Mr. Francis, who died Sunday at age 89, would also be remembered as the jockey who spectacularly managed to lose in the 1956 Grand National, Great Britain's most famous steeplechase. A photograph of him within a whisker of the finish line, aboard Queen Elizabeth's horse Devon Loch, flat on its belly with four legs helplessly splayed out, is one of racing's strangest images. To "do a Devon Loch" is a still a byword for losing a race from a seemingly unassailable position.

But the disaster actually helped launch Mr. Francis's subsequent career as a journalist and then as horse racing's most eloquent writer of thrillers. Almost all his books became international best-sellers, and they made Mr. Francis a wealthy man.

After the death in 2000 of Mary Francis, his wife of 53 years and a close collaborator on his books, Mr. Francis expressed doubts that he would ever write another novel. "She was the moving force behind my writing," he said. "I don't think I shall write again other than letters now. So much of my work was her."

Indeed, he didn't write another novel until Under Orders in 2006. That novel brought back Sid Halley, the retired steeplechase jockey who was his champion sleuth.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Winkelman, who co-owns Tecolote Books with Mr. Simon, said that the company would retain its current editorial leadership, with Elaine Szewczyk as editor and Eric Liebetrau as managing editor. Mr. Winkelman said that Mr. Simon was "an inveterate and unquenchable and voracious reader" who was a longtime subscriber to Kirkus, which was founded in 1933. "The idea that Kirkus was leaving was a real shame for him," Mr. Winkelman said.

In a statement, Mr. Simon said: "With the growth of e-books and e-reading devices, no one can really see the future of publishing. But turmoil like this creates opportunities. At a time when even the definition of a book is changing, my love of books makes me want to be part of the solution for the book publishing industry."

"Over the years SFX, and its readers and their votes in the polls, have always been very kind to me. I thought I'd return the favour with what used to be called, in journalistic circles when I was a boy, a scoop.

As anyone who's read my blog knows, I'm a big fan of a certain long-running British SF TV series. One that started watching -- from behind the sofa -- when I was three. And while I know it's cruel to make you wait for things, in about 14 months from now, which is to say, NOT in the upcoming season but early in the one after that, it's quite possible that I might have written an episode. And if I had, it would originally have been called "The House of Nothing". But it definitely isn't called that any more.

The Arts Minister John Day says the prize has now been scrapped. Instead, he says the government will increase the prize money for the Premier's Book Awards.

"The State Government is now under a lot more pressure than was the case two years ago and there is simply not the ability to continue that sort of prize in the longer term."

"So we've made the decision to increase the funding that will be going into the WA Premier's Book Awards and to increase the status of those awards and I think that that is really the best outcome."

Peckham will receive the kudo at the Writers Guild Awards' West Coast ceremonies on Feb. 20 at the Century Plaza. Previous recipients include Allison Cross, Gary Ross, Cynthia Whitcomb, David E. Kelley, Eric Roth, Michael Mann, Jason Horwitch, Don Payne, Robert Eisele & Jeffrey Porro, and most recently, Dustin Lance Black for "Milk."

"Anthony Peckham's screenplay for Invictus perfectly illustrates what the Paul Selvin Award stands for, expertly conveying how only a few men can unite to impact positive change, and have that change resonate around the world," said WGA West president John Wells.