All the Latest...

New book deals of interest...Opium Fiend by an anonymous American writer now living in Southeast Asia who went from being an expert on rare 19th-century opium smoking paraphernalia to a 30-pipe a day addict. Jenny Gardiner's Parrothood is being touted as a Marley & Me with parrots. Since parrots live such long lives, hopefully we won't have to endure a sobfest at the end, like Marley & Me. Vikas Swarup, who wrote Q&A, the novel that became the movie hit of the year, Slumdog Millionaire, has signed a deal for his next novel, Six Suspects.

Books to movies...Film rights have been sold for The Story of Edgar Sawtelle with Oprah and Tom Hanks producing. Neil Gaiman's Newberry award-winning Graveyard Book will be made into a movie. Dr. McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey) has bought the movie rights to Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain, which he will produce and star in. Television rights for M.J. Rose's The Reincarnationist have been sold to Fox.

Awards...The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its awards. The finalists in fiction are: Roberto Bolaño for 2666, Marilynne Robinson for Home, Aleksandar Hemon for The Lazarus Project, M. Glenn Taylor for The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, and Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kittredge. You can check out the rest of the nominees here. The finalists for the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature are Elisa Albert for The Book of Dahlia, Sana Krasikov for One More Year, Anne Landsman for The Rowing Lesson, Dalia Sofer for The Septembers of Shiraz, and Anya Ulinich for Petropolis.

In other news...Things are not looking good in the publishing industry. Many publishing houses continue to lay off employees. Publisher's Weekly recently laid off its editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. Reed Business Information, which owns PW, as well as Library Journal and School Library Journal has decided to make SLJ's editor Brian Kenney the editorial director of all three publications. Reed is also shutting down Criticas, a guide used by many librarians to select Spanish-language titles. The Washington Post is dropping its Book World section. February 15th will be its last issue. Content will now be divided between the Outlook and Style & Arts sections. BookExpo Canada, scheduled for June, has been cancelled, allegedly due to lack of industry interest. Are you sufficiently depressed?

And now for some fun facts to lighten the mood...JFK was a bad library patron! When President Kennedy served in the Senate in the 1950s, he checked out the 1930 biography A. Lincoln by Ross F. Lockridge from the Library of Congress and never returned it!! The book was recently found amongst President Kennedy's papers. The book has been listed as missing in the Library of Congress's online catalog and will be returned to the Library.

Remember that dreamy scene in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice where Colin Firth dives into the lake after returning to Pemberly? That wasn't actually Colin Firth doing the diving. A stuntman was used for the dive because they worried that Firth could catch Weil's disease, which comes from rat urine in the water. Nice, huh? For a single man in possession of a good fortune will not be so desirable if he has a rat pee disease. Also, the portrait of Mr. Darcy (Firth) that hung in Pemberly in the movie was recently sold at auction for about $16,000.