Writer's Report 2.0

Associated Press

Stephen King is a video star.

The animated video adaptation of the horror master’s short story “N.” has been viewed more than a 1 million times on the Internet and on mobile phones since its release in July, according to publisher Simon & Schuster. King has well demonstrated his digital appeal before; his e-novella “Riding the Bullet” was a sensation in the early years of the Internet.

“Stephen King has once again lured his readers to try a new way to enjoy a story,” Susan Moldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, said Thursday in a statement.

The print version of King’s short story, in which a psychiatrist fatally absorbs the madness of one of his patients, is included in the collection “Just After Sunset,” released this week.

You can find all 25 Episodes of “N.” at: www.Nishere.com

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From The Associated Press
By Cain Burdeau

Anne Rice has a new book — a memoir in fact — that’s climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then.

Normal if it were 1994 — the height of Rice’s megaselling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic pulp.

For those who haven’t been paying attention lately to vampire lit, America’s most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn’t live in New Orleans anymore — and hasn’t since before Hurricane Katrina hit — and she’s riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit.

Her memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,” is the latest piece of evidence that Rice is reinventing herself in an attempt to build a reputation as a serious Christian writer.

In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn’t disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches — with a batch of S&M erotica thrown in — following the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, “Interview With the Vampire.”

But she’s clearly moved on.

In a telephone interview from her mountain home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Rice laid out her goal:
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This is a shocker!

From TV Guide:

Michael Crichton, whose contributions to pop culture ranged from the human drama of ER and Disclosure to the sci-fi adventures Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, has died after what his family called “a private battle with cancer.” He was 66.

“While the world knew him as a great storyteller that challenged our preconceived notions about the world around us … family and friends knew Michael Crichton as a devoted husband, loving father and generous friend who inspired each of us to strive to see the wonders of our world through new eyes,” his family said in a statement. “He did this with a wry sense of humor that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget.”

Crichton died Tuesday, the family said.

His page-turner novels — and later the plethora of TV shows and films based on his work — balanced hard science with rip-roaring adventure and small-scale emotion. They sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.
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From The Associated Press

TULSA, Okla. – A library book checked out from a Tulsa high school in 1947 has been returned — with a $250 check to cover overdue fees.

Holland Hall School librarian Betty Niver says the book “New Word Analysis: Or School Etymology of English Derivative Words” was mailed to the school by Martha McCabe Jarrett.

Jarrett, of Venice, Fla., was Martha McCabe, a sophomore, when she signed out the book 61 years ago at what was then Holland Hall School for Girls. She recently found it while cleaning out her other home in Rome, Ohio.

“It was just there, with the things I enjoy and my kids don’t,” she said Friday.

In a note sent with the book, she included the check to pay any fines. But she wasn’t sure how she wound up with the book. “I don’t know if it was something the library was getting rid of, or my Latin teacher had given me, or if I just kept it,” she said.

“I sent it back just because I value the education I got at that school,” she said.

School officials said they were not sure what they will do with the $250 because there is no specific overdue book fund. It might be put toward student scholarships.

The book has closed on the great and inimitable Studs Terkel.

The ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the “non-celebrated,” died Friday.

New York Times
By William Grimes

Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre, and who for decades was the voluble host of a popular radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home there. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by Lois Baum, a friend and longtime colleague at the radio station WFMT.

In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Mr. Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens. Over the decades, he developed a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular.

“Division Street: America” (1966), his first best seller and the first in a triptych of tape- recorded works, explored the urban conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” (1970) and “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do” (1974).

Mr. Terkel’s book “ ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II” won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
In “Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times” (1977), Mr. Terkel turned the microphone on himself to produce an engaging memoir. In “Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (1992) and “Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It” (1995), he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience of growing old.

Although detractors derided him as a sentimental populist whose views were simplistic and occasionally maudlin, Mr. Terkel was widely credited with transforming oral history into a popular literary form. In 1985 a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized his books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing.”

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