Young British historian Richard Hargreaves has spent £40,000 (around $80,000 US) and fifteen years researching and writing a book about the momentous WWII landings and battles at Normandy … from the Nazis’ point of view. Planned for a September release, The Germans in Normandy sprang from an idea that Hargreaves had as a 19-year-old media [...]
According to the Lowell Sun in Jack Kerouac’s Massachusetts hometown, the executor of Kerouac’s literary estate says he signed a contract on Sunday with Viking/Penguin to publish an unedited version of On the Road next year — exactly as it appeared in its original “scroll” version, typed over three weeks on one continuous 120-foot roll [...]
Stylemaking singer, tragic addict — Billie Holiday is a cultural icon right up there with I Dream of Jeannie and Che Guevara. But now evidence is emerging that Holiday was a big fibber. Lies pepper her ghostwritten 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues — and they pepper the new 50th-anniversary edition from Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, [...]
Over the next few weeks, Mini Cooper — the company that makes those cute retro cars — will run an ad campaign aimed at Americans who already own the cars. It seems an odd choice of target market, but the campaign sounds so cute. Encrypted ads will appear in major magazines such as the New [...]
A White Castle burger. Those inexpensive little burgers dispensed 24 hours a day in hundreds of slightly castellar-looking structures throughout eleven American states — it’s White Castle, a cliché and a staple all rolled into one, for the millions who live in their midst (not including Dibs!, who has never actually seen one). Now, to [...]
A Japanese theatrical troupe is performing the Celtic chivalry epic Tristan and Isolde — Cornish knight, Irish princess, love potion, danger, escape, mortal wounds, misery — set not in the misty, chilly region of its origins but in Okinawa, Honshu and Hokkaido — with Tristan as a tribal Ainu. According to the Japan Times, “Satoshi [...]
Police officers executing a search warrant last week at the public library in Norman, Oklahoma, discovered “nine unopened Trojan condoms; three opened Trojan condom wrappers; one green penis ring; one bottle KY liquid lubricant; DVD Young as they Cum; a quilt, fitted sheet, top sheet and two pillows; a book, The Secret Lives of Girls; [...]
An asteroid has been named after the billionaire novelist, according to the U.K.’s Daily Record. Astronomer Mark Hammergren, who works at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, discovered asteroid 43844. Having begun reading the Harry Potter series two years ago, he wanted to name his new find after the author and submitted his proposal to the proper authorities. [...]
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and widely hailed by critics, but now residents of London’s real Brick Lane neighborhood are protesting local production of the film version, calling the novel racist, according to the Guardian. Ruby Films’ adaptation is already underway in a London studio, but a petition [...]
Buy my book! As the lines continue to blur between being famous for one thing and doing another because you’re famous for the first, we can only wonder whether publishers keep giving book deals to actors because they know they can sell books this way (probably) or because they just want a laff. “Goldie Hawn [...]