As the Book World Turns….

Plenty of news came out of the book world this week.  Here’s a look at what caught our eye and got us talking, in no particular order:

Téa, Téa, Téa – We can’t stop talking about Téa Obreht, and neither can the New York Times, The Rumpus, The Wasthington Post, and NPR (to name a few; the screen could easily be filled with the accolades her new novel, The Tiger’s Wife, has received in its first week on sale.)  Come see for yourself what all the buzz is about when Téa is here at BookPeople next week on Tuesday, March 15, 7pm.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night.  Kudos to Jennifer Egan, Sarah Bakewell, C. D. Wright, Clare Cavanagh, Isabel Wilkerson, and Darin Strauss.

Funding for Reading is Fundamental, the country’s largest literary resource organization for children, has been eliminated.

The folks over at University of California Press are hard at work on the next two volumes of Mark Twain’s autobiography, and at learning how to live with the first volume’s runaway success.

Stephen King announced a new novel in his Dark Tower series, The Dark Tower:  The Wind Through the Keyhole.

Dynamic husband and wife duo Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union) and Ayelet Waldman (Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Red Hook Road) are collaborating for the first time to write a script for HBO about a group of magicians and conmen who battle Hitler during World War II.

Congratulations to Brand Skyhorse, whose short story collection The Madonnas of Echo Park won the Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction. Skyhorse joins the ranks of Jhumpa Lahiri, Justin Cronin, and Chang-rae Lee as a recipient.

Julianne Moore will play Sarah Palin in the upcoming adaptation of the bestselling book about John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Game Change.

This isn’t news, but it’s cool:  Hitchhiker’s Guide tattoos.

And so there you go, now you’ll sound in-the-know at all those South by Southwest parties.

-Julie