A bookseller in India has been arrested for the heinous crime of stocking a book that allegedly contained “objectional references to Islam,” and its publisher has been interrogated by police, according to today’s Hindustan Times. How is this even possible in an allegedly free country? It happened after the chief cleric of a mosque complained to [...]
You know that current trend in which historical novels have, as their protagonists, actual celebrities who actually lived? A certain sector of novelists “re-animates” such flesh-and-blood people as Sappho, Thomas Jefferson and Arthur Conan Doyle. Last week we got a new one in which Jack London gallivants around Hawaii. Well, now there’s a new twist [...]
Thailand’s last prison executioner, Chavoret Jaruboon, fired eight bullets into a rapist and murderer in 2002. It was his fifty-fifth execution, and the last of its kind. (Executions in Thailand are now done by lethal injection.) He tells all in The Last Executioner, a memoir written in English with coauthor Nicola Price. “Those who had nothing to lose – those [...]
Yet another leading light of the music scene is penning a memoir. Bob Mould, now 48, was the frontman for that well-loved ’80s speedcore/punk band, Hüsker Dü. He’s working on a book with the help of rock writer Michael Azerrad, according to Prefix magazine. Due in fall 2010 from Little, Brown, the book “will cover his work [...]
As a new American Idol season gets ready to start, one of the most talked-about contestants from an earlier season — lustrous-haired Sanjaya Malakar — has a new book due for a January 20 release. Coauthored by Alan Goldsher, Malakar’s Dancing to the Music in My Head: Memoirs of the People’s Idol includes a blow-by-blow recounting of his [...]
Lou Reed is a legend in his own time. One of the 20th century’s most remarkable songwriters, the author of such ’60s classics as “Heroin” and “Walk on the Wild Side” — a Brooklyn native who underwent electroshock therapy to “cure” his homosexuality as a boy — rose to fame with the Velvet Underground and, [...]
Dibs! is back after a long hiatus. Brace yourself for some more book news!
A seventeen-year-old South African girl who claims that the Virgin Mary has visited her twenty times, sat on her bed and given her healing powers is now writing a book about her experiences. Francesca Zackey remains defiant, even though the Church has officially asked her to stop blessing pilgrims, according to South Africa’s Independent Online. [...]
She left Oakland, California — which is undergoing a plague of homicides this summer — but violent crime followed her. Decomposed, face beaten beyond recognition, the body of 21-year-old Boitumelo “Tumi” McCallum — who attended Oakland’s Mills College last year — was found on August 5 wrapped in a sheet between a wall and a bloody, [...]
Norway’s 35-year-old Princess Martha Louise, author of the 2006 English-language children’s book Why Kings and Queens Don’t Wear Crowns, “has shocked the nation by announcing she is a clairvoyant and wants to teach people how to communicate with angels,” according to the Times Online. Having opened the Astarte Centre for alternative therapy this month, the [...]