Bookmarks: a small town book tour, inappropriate books for kids, and Walt Whitman selling jeans

Bookish links from across the Web:

• Test your celebrity poet knowledge over at Details and guess which verses have been written by Michael Jackson, Mr. Spock, Jewel, or William Butler Yeats
• Battle of the sexes, poetry edition: Do women write “female” poetry? 
• Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue tour skips San Francisco and Los Angeles and makes stops in Noblesville, Indiana, and Rochester, New York 
• Don’t tell Scholastic: a new blog dedicated to inappropriate books for kids
• Recordings of Walt Whitman reading “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “America” are being used in Levi’s Jeans new ad campaign. Controversial use of a dead poet’s work or clever marketing strategy? Slate Magazine discusses
• Kazuo Ishiguro “auditions” characters to narrate his novels. Colum McCann will print out chapters of his incomplete book, staple them together, and take them to Central Park, pretending to be reading someone else’s work. The Wall Street Journal interviews 11 top authors about their writing habits

Bookmarks: Terminatrix Palin, Wild Things art, and the interactive Proust questionnaire

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s HarperCollins editor has a double life, The Daily Beast reports. He also helped work on the satirical title published during Palin’s VP run, Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles
• Just before the Oct. 16 opening of the long-awaited Where the Wild Things Are, Vice Magazine has compiled a gallery of WtWTA-inspired artwork by 24 of its favourite artists; The New York Times wonders if kids actually “get” Maurice Sendak’s much-celebrated tale; and Newsweek interviews Sendak, screenwriter Dave Eggers, and director Spike Jonze on fear, childhood, and Mickey Mouse, among other things
• In order to promote its forthcoming book, Vanity Fair now makes its infamous Proust questionnaire available as an interactive game
• Google vs. Angela Merkel: The Guardian reports that the German chancellor has intervened in the debate and is appealing for more international co-operation on copyright protection
• Today, starting at 12 EST, fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman and a thousand Twitter followers will collaborate on an audiobook script. Sponsored by BBC Audiobooks America, the “round-robin interactive storytelling experience” takes place on this Twitter page

Memoirs of a Hockey Mom: or, how Sarah Palin penned a memoir in a real hurry

Just in time for Christmas the upcoming holiday shopping season, one of the most baffling interesting figures in American politics has penned a tell-all memoir, the L.A. Times reports. 

Ex-governor Sarah Palin’s 400-page tome, titled Going Rogue: An American Life, will hit shelves Nov.17, well in advance of the spring release date.  According to Politico, Palin finished writing her manuscript before her Sept.15 deadline and the memoir is now undergoing a speedy copy-edit and fact-checking to meet the revised publishing schedule.

The memoir will be published by Harper, a division of HarperCollins, with an expected print run of a whopping 1.5-million, the same number as Ted Kennedy’s True Compass.  

Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham tells the L.A. Times that the memoir contains many “fascinating details.” Which makes one wonder what fascinating details about the former Alaska governor haven’t already been revealed by her daughter’s baby daddy.

Sarah Palin memoir: Now with 25% more God!

Well, she sure does know her target audience. In a profile in the August 2009 of Vanity Fair, Alaska governor Sarah Palin revealed that her forthcoming memoir will be published both by HarperCollins (as previously announced), and also by HarperCollins’ Christian publishing imprint Zondervan in a separate, special edition. From the Vanity Fair profile:

Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith.

(Thanks to Publishers Weekly for the tip.)

Bookmarks: The future of the novel, a new literary journal, and Sarah Palin signs an agent

Sundry links from around the Web:

• n+1, the brainy journal out of New York City, launches a new literary supplement.
• The Columbia Journalism Review unveils its own books blog.
• Lev Grossman on the future of publishing. The novel, he predicts, is turning into “something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.”
• Sarah Palin gets serious in her search for a ridiculous advance publisher.
• From the Guardian: “MP calls on government to protect struggling independent booksellers.”
• Everything you ever wanted to know about Scandinavian detective fiction but were too afraid to ask.
• Next stop, Dostoevskaya station.
• Save the Washington Post’s Book World. Sign the petition here.

Tina Fey’s book deal

Tina Fey is planning to add “author” to her list of accomplishments. The Emmy-award-winning actress and Sarah Palin impersonator has inked a U.S. $6-million deal with Little, Brown & Co.

An article in today’s National Post suggests that while the advance is huge and Fey is an untested author, and publishers were reportedly expected to bid on the book without so much as a meeting or proposal, sales in Canada will still be successful.

“I still think a hell of a lot of Canadians will buy the book,” says Anne Collins, publisher of Random House Canada. “There’s her work on 30 Rock and her drop-dead satiric take on Sarah Palin, but that’s not what they’re betting on — they’re betting even bigger on the Tina Fey brand, and I think she can deliver that in book form.”

As a fellow author/comedian on this side of the border notes, it’s an “only in America” publishing moment.

“Six million for a book sounds good to me,” says Rick Mercer, author of Rick Mercer Report: The Book, out this month in paperback. “Canada is a different animal. I’m No. 5 on the Canadian best-seller list right now — I’ve been with three political campaigns this week, and it hasn’t been mentioned once.”