O.J. — now with singing and dancing!

With his “confessional” book scrapped, O.J. is turning to musical theatre to get his story out.

Okay, no he’s not. But at this point, would anyone be shocked if he was?

In any case, Ben Greenman at McSweeney’s has created “Fragments from If I Did It! The Musical” for those interested in wickedly funny musical satire.

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Sing along with McSweeney’s

Giller virgins profiled at the Post

Just in time for tonight’s Giller gala, Shinan Govani covered the more gossipy side of the event in yesterday’s Post. Focusing on “Giller virgins,” ie, those who’ve never been to the event before, Govani mentioned Justin Trudeau, host of the evening, Trudeau’s wife Sophie Gregoire, and … a two-week old baby. Carolyn Weaver, co-host of Fine Print, though not a Giller virgin herself, will be bringing her son Thorne to the festivities, as Govani related in typically effusive prose.

Oh, and the Giller finalists got a mention: “Meanwhile, there are some very expectant authors who’ll be in the spotlight, too.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story

Comic books and soap operas, together at last

This week, there’s something even weirder than usual appearing on daytime TV. Marvel Comics has teamed up with long-running soap opera Guiding Light to produce a superhero-themed episode and an eight-page comic book.

According to The New York Times, “the episode is a mix of slapstick (a thief is shocked by the heroine, and his hair stands on end) and drama (are the powers worth possibly losing her husband?). Transitions between scenes feature comic book panels by Alex Chung,” the artist of “A New Light,” the eight-page comic that will commemorate the partnership.

As bizarre as this collaboration sounds, the Times does make the pretty good point that comic books and soaps do share “never-ending stories, characters with complex histories, and a preponderance of long-lost relatives (evil twins or otherwise).”

Still, Quillblog can’t help but chuckle at the still from the soap, with the hero, Guiding Light, clothed in an over-the-top silver lamé outfit and navy cape, straining to push a car.

Related links:
Read the Times story here

Dirty politics

Slate has a quiz up today entitled “Match the Porn With the Politician Who Wrote It!,” in which readers are given a dozen or so book excerpts, ranging from the steamy to the unsettling, and are asked to — as the title suggests — match them to the political figures who wrote them. Cadidates range from Jimmy Carter to Winston Churchill (who, interestingly enough, is not responsible for the excerpt that ends with the indelicate placement of a cigar).

Related links:
Take Slate’s quiz

The short story, even shorter

Wired has a feature in its November issue on short short short fiction. Inspired by Hemingway, who wrote a six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) that he’s said to have called his best work, they asked sci-fi writers and personalities to try their hands at the same feat.

Notable Canadian entries come from Atwood (“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”) and Shatner (“Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.”).

The online version of the story also includes 59 six-word tales that didn’t make it to print, including one from another Canadian, Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, who spotted this link in the first place: “Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.”

Related links:
Click here for the Wired story

The Bookers, digested

As you may or may not have heard, this year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced today. To bring busy would-be readers up to speed, The Guardian has a special Booker edition of its “Digested Reads” feature, in which all six shortlisted books are rewritten in the styles of the originals, but in extremely condensed form.

Our personal favourite has to be the digested version of The Inheritance of Loss, the portentously titled novel by Kiran Desai. It begins thus:

The description of the mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of the Himalayas possessed of ocean shadows and depths told Sai that she had inadvertently found her way into a lyrical evocation of post- colonial multiculturalism. She picked up a copy of National Geographic. “That should add a nice post-modern ironic nod to globalisation,” she reckoned.

[Note: digested reads of the Giller prize shortlist -- or of any other new Canadian book, for that matter -- would be enthusiastically welcomed in the comment section below.]

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Read more Digested Reads at The Guardian

Quillblog: The Book

Just think — one day, you could be reading this blog in book form. Wired reports today that “Blurb.com, a self-publishing startup, will invite 600 bloggers this week to test out its new service by creating a free bound copy of their blog.”

Blurb.com CEO Eileen Gittins is keen to cash in on the digital publishing trend and our blog-happy society. “Distribution in the publishing industry is becoming all about making a book discoverable across the web, increasing its visibility to potential readers,” she says. She also says, somewhat frighteningly, that “Blog is just one flavor of content we will slurp.” Yuck.

Either way, what bloggers will get is this: “An 8-by-10 full-color, hardcover book with custom dust jacket costs between $30 and $80 … [and will include features] like extensive customization options, an e-commerce storefront, and forthcoming tagging and metadata add-ons.”

HarperCollins, ever digitally conscious, weighs in — on both sides. Group president Brian Murray says, “The role of a 21st-century publisher is making books available offline and on,” while CEO Jane Friedman says, “self-publishing is little more than a vanity press.”

Related links:
Read the full article here

Sci-fi groping brouhaha

Harlan Ellison brought some much-needed scandale to the Hugos when he groped fellow sci-fi scribe Connie Willis and kissed her for good measure when accepting his Special Committee Award this week. He also put the microphone in his mouth.

(At least, we think that’s what happened: the picture at midamercon.org’s photo gallery shows a strange object protruding from Ellison’s maw pre-acceptance. Adding to the strangeness are the hammer and duct tape on the podium.)

The nerd blogs were up in arms over the incident denouncing Ellison as a “boorish pig” (Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant) and “taking all the fun out of being in the genre and not inspiring anyone with anything but horror and the urge to vomit and throw out their books.”

What Ellison needs is his own Marty McFly to teach him how to behave around a woman.

Related links:
See the incident here
Read the various blog postings about The Grope below
http://www.edrants.com/?p=4188

Grass opts for openness

Yahoo! News is carrying a Reuters story today reporting that Günter Grass is getting a pat on the back from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem for his decision “to waive restrictions on his Nazi archives so the center could investigate his time in Hitler’s Waffen-SS.”

Apparently, Germany has very strict data protection laws, which would keep the details of Grass’s recently unshadied past on lockdown, but the center’s appeal last week for full access melted Grass’s heart.

According to the story, Efraim Zuroff, head of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement, “While access to archives will certainly make a historical investigation easier, documents by themselves will not deliver a clear picture of his war service.”

The center has found that “press reports on his past have been contradictory” and hope the author will speak out to set the record straight once and for all by “giv[ing] details about the unit or units he belonged to and about any operations and his role during this time,” according to Zuroff.

Related links:
Read the full Yahoo! News story here

Snakes on our blog

PW Daily has a story about Sterling Publishers’ cashing in on the marketing behemoth that is Snakes on a Plane by churning out — wait for it — Snakes on a Sudoku.

According to the story, “Sudoku grids [feature] diagonally connected boxes, or ‘snakes,’ slithering through the standard game board. (Or, as the house’s marketing copy describes it, ‘replaces the traditional 3×3 squares with deadly s-s-s-s-snakes.’). The idea for the title, which went to press for 40,000 copies and has, according to Sterling’s director of library and specialty marketing Chris Vaccari, sold 1,000 copies in its first three days on the market, grew out of a joke conceived by one of the house’s editors.”

The snake-y Sudoku puzzle first appeared on Sterling editor Francis Heaney’s blog back in March, leading to “a mention in an April 14 Entertainment Weekly cover story about the film and its unexpected online fan base …. Sterling managed to scrape together a licensing deal and enough snake-filled Sudokus to get their unusual addition to the SoaP (that’s the invented acronym of the title, to you non-fans) frenzy in front of readers in just enough time.”

Related links:
Read PW Daily story here