One of the most prolific sci-fi/horror authors of all time died of cardiopulmonary disease last Friday. Charles Grant, who was born in 1942 and won two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards, had taught public school and served in Vietnam before becoming a full-time writer in 1975. Since then, the New Jersey resident wrote [...]
Three books have been removed from the Baillieu Library at Australia’s Melbourne University for promoting jihad and martyrdom, according to the Herald Sun. The country’s new anti-terror sedition laws drove the decision to remove two of the books, Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, which “were the subject of an investigation by [...]
He’s on Death Row in an Ohio prison, sentenced in 1987 for the murder of two-year-old Cynthia Collins. And now Kenny Richey wants to publish a cookbook based on recipes he has devised in prison. The 42-year-old Edinburgh native “is in talks with US publisher Excess Q to see if he can have Death Row [...]
And you think you have “challenges”! Blind one-legged mountaineer Syd Scroggie, whose death at age 86 was reported yesterday by the BBC, was a poet and author and World War II vet, serving in a ski/mountain regiment called Lord Lovat’s Scouts. “Just weeks before the war ended he was injured by an anti-personnel mine in [...]
Just as news reports are surfacing today about the tragic death last weekend of Anna Nicole Smith’s twenty-year-old son Daniel, a new (posthumous) book by the late son of another very famous figure is about to be published. Billed by its publisher, Soft Skull, as “a portrait of a wasted life,” Cursed From Birth is [...]
Irish firefighters are commonly assaulted by hooligans who stab them with used hypodermic needles and trash their firetrucks as they attempt to fight conflagrations and save lives, according to a new book, Firecall: True Stories of Irish Firefighting & Rescue, by Ruairi Kavanagh, former editor of Firecall magazine, the official journal of Irish fire and [...]
If you can’t be safe in a bookstore, then where CAN you be safe? Well, you can’t be safe in bookstores anymore, judging from an ongoing crime wave in the Boston area. Today police are “looking for a man who allegedly assaulted a young girl in the children’s section of a popular bookstore,” according to [...]
Authored by noted film scholar David Thomson, the brand-new bio Nicole Kidman is being described as “explosive” as it portrays the actress “as a power-hungry fame seeker who used her 10-year marriage to Tom Cruise to hit the Hollywood big time,” according to Sydney Confidential. Kidman never even met Thomson, according to her agent Wendy [...]
Cody’s Books, whose Telegraph Avenue store closed earlier this summer, has just been acquired by Yohan, Inc., a major Japanese bookseller. I had heard rumors these past few weeks that “some Japanese company” had bought the business from Andy Ross. Apparently this is the company. The press release sent to Dibs! moments ago says: “Hiroshi [...]
Libraries grow ever more sinister, as the cute toys distributed to participants in summer-reading programs nationwide have been found to contain perilous quantities of lead. As reported by Lexington, Kentucky’s Lex18.com, the bendable cats and dogs were distributed at fourteen Kentucky libraries as well as in 36 other states whose libraries conducted similar literacy-enhancing programs. [...]