New 'Vooks' Sex Up Books With Video Clips

It will be 'very different' than Harry Potter

(NEWSER) - JK Rowling is back, but if you're hoping for more adventures starring a certain boy wizard—or anything along the lines of those books—you're out of luck. Little, Brown and Company announced today that it had acquired the rights to publish a new book by Rowling, but this one will be aimed at adults, the New York Times reports. More»

Grove Press founder championed Beat poets, Samuel Beckett, erotica

(NEWSER) - Barney Rosset, founder of the envelope-pushing, censorship-defying Grove Press, died at age 89 on Tuesday after a double-heart-valve replacement, the New York Times reports. The irascible Rosset once described his press as "a breach in the dam of American Puritanism," and it lived up to that name, publishing works like DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer despite attempts to censor them. He defended the works, and other provocative offerings, in court, opening the door to sexually explicit material in US literature. More»

Morality is based on cancer struggle

(NEWSER) - For fans of Christopher Hitchens , one final book. A memoir entitled Mortality will be released in early 2012; it's based on a series of articles the journalist wrote for Vanity Fair describing his battle with esophageal cancer, reports the Guardian . A spokesman noted that the book had been in the works for some time. Hitchens asserted in his final column for Vanity Fair, "Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to 'do' death in the active and not the passive sense." More»

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.

Author's debut was 'collage of others' work'

(NEWSER) - Bookseller Quentin Rowan appears to have forged a writing career entirely by raiding the contents of his shelves. Publisher Little, Brown & Co. recalled every single copy of his debut spy thriller, Assassin of Secrets—written under the pseudonym QR Markham—after discovering that passages had been lifted from more than a dozen other spy novels, both classic and contemporary, reports the Wall Street Journal . In one place, a nine-paragraph passage lifted from a Robert Ludlum thriller flows cleanly into a seven-paragraph passage plucked from one of John Gardner's James Bond novels. More»