'Realish' Sedaris Book Skirts Memoir Scrutiny

Stephen King, Christopher Hitchens make the cut

(NEWSER) - If you need a book recommendation for holiday reading, look no further than the New York Times ' list of the 10 best books of the year. Five are fiction and five non-fiction:

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King: A time portal sends an English teacher back to 1958 to try and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. King reflects "on questions of memory, fate, and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America."
• Swamplandia! By Karen Russell: "Exuberantly inventive language" marks this story of "a heroine who is wise beyond her years" as she tries to preserve her family's way of life. Also, an alligator theme park is involved.

304 pages of what, exactly?

(NEWSER) - It might be something like War & Peace or The Call of the Wild, except with more dancing and belated abstinence, but a new literary Wasillan has gone rogue. Amazon has a pre-order page for a 304-page Bristol Palin memoir, set to be released in September by HarperCollins. Gawker 's Jim Newell takes a stab at the plot: "Part One: I was born. Part Two: I got pregnant. Part Three: I went dancing on teevee. Part Four: ??" Click for more on the book ... like its price tag . More»

New book alleges that Wladyslaw Szpilman worked with Nazis

(NEWSER) - Wladyslaw Szpilman, the real-life Polish pianist whose memoir inspired Roman Polanski’s award-winning film The Pianist, actually collaborated with the Gestapo, according to a new book. Entitled Accused: Wiera Gran, the book quotes the private notes of Wiera Gran, a deceased Polish singer who once claimed that Szpilman “formed a gang to kill me.” Gran refers to Szpilman as a “Gestapo man,” and says he worked as a Jewish policeman who helped resettle Warsaw’s Jews, the Guardian reports. More»

An editor was likely the one to polish her prose, says professor

(NEWSER) - Jane Austen is known as a “perfect stylist,” but those perfectly crafted sentences may not actually be hers. After studying 1,100 pages of Austen’s handwritten, unpublished manuscripts, an Oxford professor concluded that “the polished punctuation and epigrammatic style … is simply not there,” she tells the BBC . In its place is a more free-flowing, somewhat untidy style, featuring limited punctuation. More»

'The Decider' focuses on moments where he stepped up

(NEWSER) - George W. Bush hasn't written a memoir, exactly. Instead he's been working "almost every day," his publisher, Crown, says, on Decision Points, which offers “gripping, never-before-heard details” on the biggest decisions of Bush's life, from the day he quit drinking to 9/11. An industry source tells the AP that W. has already finished a draft of the book, which is scheduled to be released November 9, exactly a week after the 2010 election. More»