In A Suitable Boy, the central character is the young and rebellious Lata whose mother attempts to find her a husband.

The family saga is played out in post-independence India, and examines the traditions and political and religious upheavals of the time.

In A Suitable Girl, Lata is 75-80 years old and looking for a wife for her grandson, "whether he is thinking about it or not," Seth said.

"That allows me in a sense to bring a whole lot of post-independence history to bear on the novel. It allows me to live in the present.

A British private buyer purchased the book, signed by the author, at one of the world's largest antiquarian book fairs in London this week– an annual event at which prints, photographs, manuscripts and books are sold for up to £500,000.

"This copy of Ulysses is exceptional because it is in such pristine condition," vendor Pom Harrington, who made the deal, told Reuters.

"The book was smuggled into New York during the ban in the 1920s and has been in the same family since," Harrington added.

"The National Book Festival has become a true American institution," said James Billington, the librarian of Congress. "It is a joyous and very popular celebration of books and reading in the Washington, D.C., area."

The Library of Congress organizes and sponsors the event, which is free and open to the public.

An estimated 120,000 people have attended each of the past two festivals, a library spokeswoman said.

With publishers cutting back new releases in response to declining sales, an estimated 275,000 traditional books were released in the United States last year, a drop of about 9,000 from 2007, according to Bowker, a New Providence, N.J.-based company that compiles industry statistics. Categories with the biggest reductions included travel, religion and biography, Bowker said Tuesday.

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

• Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman
• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
• The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt
• Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden
• Home by Marilynne Robinson
• Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

The Internet Archive has sent a letter to Judge Dennis Chin, the judge overseeing the Google/Authors Guild, AAP case seeking permission to file a motion that would ask the court to alter the proposed settlement to give other companies that have scanned printed books the same copyright protection of orphan works that would be granted to Google in the settlement. In the letter, the Archive notes that it is one of a number of parties interesting in opposing the settlement, "because it effectively limits the liability for the identified uses of orphan works of one party alone, Google...all other persons, including Internet content providers such as the Archive, would not be able to use orphan works broadly without being exposed to claims of infringement."

Kirschbaum said she and Stefan McGrath, the managing director of Penguin Classics, sealed the deal after a three-day stay at Dimitri Nabakov's home in Montreaux, Switzerland. It was brokered by Andrew Wylie, the New York-based literary agent known as 'The Jackal'.

Kirschbaum said: "It was important that we meet because it was a big acquisition, and it was quite emotional for Dimitri because it was a big decision to publish, which took him decades."

The Original of Laura returns to territory that Nabokov explored in his previous novels Mary, Lolita and Ada – the yearning to recapture young love.

It is narrated by a man who fell obsessively in love with a girl when young, but is now unhappily married to a promiscuous wife.

Kirschbaum, who described the book as both dark and comic, said: "In this novel he is also very interested in psychology and in what it means to hate yourself and want to disappear."

Mancher, whose publishing PR firm One Potata Productions, Inc. will promote SPBE, said, "Self-publishing is one of the fasting growing segments of the publishing industry, and the time is ripe to have a place where these authors can interact with the public, mingle with their peers, meet representatives of the media who are otherwise unfamiliar with their work, and expose their books to a much broader audience."

Mancher is working with Mender, a former v-p, associate publisher and marketing director at Atria Books, Dell/Delacorte and HarperCollins, to produce and develop the Expo. Mender said SPBE will include panel discussions and lectures on the challenges of self-publishing, and an "Open House" for would-be authors, which will be open to the public and hosted by representatives of self-publishing companies.

The letter cites two objections to the agreement: a so-called "most favored nation" clause and the mechanism to deal with orphan works. The group maintains that because the settlement was negotiated between Google and the AAP/authors, there was no one representing the public interest in what Consumer Watchdog calls an agreement that will transform publishing.

According to Consumer Watchdog, because the settlement guarantees that Google would be offered the same terms from the Book Rights Registry that any competitor might receive, competitors would be discouraged from establishing a competing service. The most favored clause should be eliminated to remove barriers to entry, the letter states, adding that "it is inappropriate for the resolution of a class action lawsuit to effectively create an anti-compete clause."

In dealing with orphan works, Consumer Watchdog wants the protections granted to Google about potential exposure to rightsholders who may file claims to works that appear in a database extended to any company that wants to compete with Google under the same terms given to Google.

The first, Pirate Latitudes, will be published on November 24, 2009; the second, as yet untitled, will be published in Fall 2010.

Pirate Latitudes is an adventure story about piracy in the New World. Set in 1665, when Jamaica was a British colony holding out against Spanish dominance, the story centers on a plan hatched by the island's governor and a notorious pirate called Hunter to raid a Spanish treasure galleon. Fast-moving and suspenseful, Pirate Latitudes is a historical classic from one of America's best-loved authors. The novel was discovered amongst Crichton's files and was written contemporaneously with Next, published in 2006.

Jonathan Burnham, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Harper, says, Pirate Latitudes is a fantastically enjoyable and light-hearted adventure yarn about pirates and profiteers in 17th century Jamaica. It is deeply researched and full of lively historical detail, and it shows Crichton going back to the territory he explored in novels such as The Great Train Robbery - old-fashioned entertainment, with a twist."

In Fall 2010, Harper will publish his latest techno thriller which explores the outer edges of new science and technology in the way that only Michael Crichton knew how. The new novel will be based on the development of Crichton's narrative on notes and files. "It is some consolation to the millions of Crichton fans out there that two or possibly more works are in the offing, and that the amazing legacy he has left behind him will be reinvigorated by these new novels" adds Burnham.

Michael Crichton was born in 1942 and died in November 2008. His bestselling novels include State of Fear, Prey, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park and Timeline. He was also the creator of ER.

The cast also includes Aaron Eckhart, Amber Heard, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi and Michael Rispoli. Nolasco plays Segurra, the son of the biggest cement-plant owner on the island. "Diary" is the debut film of Infinitum Nihil, the production company headed by Depp and Christi Dembrowski.

With BookExpo America about two months away, show director Lance Fensterman acknowledged that the number of exhibitors will be down in 2009 from previous years. "We're trending behind last year," Fensterman said. "The show will be smaller and tighter, and there will be fewer exhibitors."

One of the largest publishers to decide not to exhibit at BEA in 2009 is Kensington Publishers. President Steve Zacharius said that given the state of the economy, "we decided it makes more sense to spend our marketing dollars where it will have more of an impact on sales." Kensington has taken space in the BEA Rights Center and will have staff walking the exhibit floor, Zacharius said, adding that the publisher will also host some cocktail parties.

• Peter Carey (Australia)
• Evan S. Connell (USA)
• Mahasweta Devi (India)
• E.L. Doctorow (USA)
• James Kelman (UK)
• Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
• Arnost Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
• Alice Munro (Canada)
• V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
• Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
• Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
• Ngugi Wa Thiong'O (Kenya)
• Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
• Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

The latter correspondence with friends and contemporaries includes exchanges with his cherished angling companion, the late Ted Hughes – and an almighty squelch from his English teacher at Dulwich college in the 1960s, who marked a reference to TS Eliot in an essay by the aspiring author as "terribly snooty".

Swift described the experience of watching his life being driven away from the door of his London home, packed into 75 file boxes in the back of a white van, as "curiously akin to donating your body to medical science while still alive".

"There was also an element of feeling I was selling the family silver. Then I thought, well, I'm still alive, and healthy, and working – so suddenly it all felt like a tremendous relief, not having to worry about them any longer, not having to think what would happen to all those papers in the loft if there were a fire or a flood."

The archive includes letters, often on literary subjects, with friends such as the poet laureate Andrew Motion, and many fellow Booker-winning novelists including Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker and Michael Ondaatje. The Ted Hughes correspondence barely mentions literature. The two men, both passionate anglers, were fishing friends on the river Torridge in Devon – a river in which, Swift recalled wistfully, it was possible to catch trout, salmon, or, on a really five-star day, sea-trout. "We rarely spoke even briefly of what we were working on," Swift says. "For both of us fishing was an escape from all that. I miss him very much."

Fictionwise, which operates the Fictionwise.com and eReader.com Web sites, was founded in 2000 by Steve and Scott Pendergast, who will continue to head the company B&N said it will operate as a separate business unit based in New Jersey. B&N added, however, that Fictionwise is part of its overall digital strategy, which includes launching an e-bookstore later this year. Last month, PW reported that B&N had plans to open an e-bookstore sometime in March; the company had no comment at the time.

The 200 or so draft pages of The Pale King were found two months after Wallace's death by his wife, Karen Green, when she was sorting out the garage where Wallace worked. The book is set in a tax office in the American midwest and features a cast of bored Internal Revenue Service agents who seek to transcend the tedium of their jobs.

An extract from the manuscript has been published in this week's New Yorker, and Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor at Little, Brown, has said that he has a tentative agreement with Wallace's agent to publish The Pale King in the spring of 2010. Pietsch described the experience of reading the manuscript, along with the accompanying notebooks and drafts, as one of "joy" rather than pain because of Wallace's "astounding, levitating, daring" writing.

The work expands on the concept of the virtues of mindfulness and concentration that Wallace tackled at a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, when he declared that true freedom "means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

Novel revolves around a youth who is the lone survivor of a sunken freighter and winds up sharing a lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a hungry Bengal tiger.

The novel, which won the Man Booker Prize, was a global publishing phenomenon when Fox 2000's Elizabeth Gabler acquired rights to the tome.

Gil Netter is producing.

In light of the economic challenges facing us, we have decided to restructure and streamline the General Books Group.

Four years ago, we launched the Collins Division within the U.S. General Books Group. While acknowledging its many successes, we have decided to return to a more focused structure. Hence, we are closing the Collins Division and realigning the imprints.

Harper, under the continued leadership of SVP, Publisher Jonathan Burnham, will expand to include the books on the Collins general non-fiction list, Collins Reference titles and Collins Business books. The Collins general non-fiction list will be published under the Harper imprint going forward. Collins Reference, both hardcover and paperbacks, will remain intact under Bruce Nichols, VP, Publisher of Collins Reference, who will also serve as Executive Editor at Harper. The Smithsonian program will continue under Elisabeth Dyssegaard. The Collins Business list will be published as Harper Business books going forward. Hollis Heimbouch, VP, Publisher, will continue to oversee the business books program and also become Executive Editor at Harper. Bruce, Elisabeth and Hollis will report to Jonathan, as will Executive Editor Adam Bellow and Senior Editor Ben Loehnen.

Collins trade paperbacks, with the exception of Collins Reference and Collins Design, will be folded into Harper Perennial and Harper paperbacks under SVP, Publisher Carrie Kania. Collins Design’s VP, Publisher Marta Schooler and her entire team will now report to Carrie, and continue to publish under the Collins Design imprint. Additionally, to further strengthen our paperback program, the Avon trade paperback line will now fall under Carrie. Stephanie Meyers, Associate Editor, will join the group and report to Cal Morgan, VP, Editorial Director.

Liate Stehlik will take over the role of SVP, Publisher of William Morrow/Eos/Avon, and will continue to oversee Avon and Harper mass market titles. Collins Living titles will be published as William Morrow books going forward and will now be part of the William Morrow imprint. Mary Ellen O’Neill will join this group as VP, Executive Editor, and take on the added responsibility of managing the William Morrow cookbooks program reporting to Liate. Senior Editor Matthew Benjamin and Editor Anne Cole will continue to report to Mary Ellen.

In another sign of the economic times, the ABA announced that it is taking various steps, among them reducing its staff and instituting a hiring freeze, to scale back operating costs. The decisions, which came out of the ABA board meeting last week in Salt Lake City, will result in a 12% staff reduction (equivalent to at least five full-time positions) through attrition; suspending contributions to employees' 401(k) and SEP plans; and eliminating all discretionary travel and discretionary spending. The ABA also intends to deliver educational programs electronically, through webinars and other "web-based communication." The cutbacks have also led to the cancellation of the group's spring forum schedule and a revamping of employees' medical benefits.

A brain-imaging study carried out by psychologists at Washington University in St Louis used functional magnetic resonance imaging to track brain activity as participants read short stories, finding that reading is by no means a passive activity. Instead, as participants read from a 1940s text about the daily activities of a young boy, activity in different brain regions increased depending on what was going on in the story.

So, if the character in the book "pulled a light cord", brain activity increased in the frontal lobe region which controls grasping motions. As the character in the story "went through the front door into the kitchen", activity went up in the relevant temporal lobes.

"There has been good evidence for a while that mental simulation - imagination - can improve performance in sport and other skilled behaviours. This study suggests that readers do mental simulation when they comprehend a story," Jeffrey Zacks, a co-author of the study and director of the university's dynamic cognition laboratory, said today. "It could well be that the simulations we perform when reading function like skilled practice. I was reading a cooking magazine last night, and I certainly hope that helps me get better with a whisk."

OUP president Tim Barton said the cuts were "a result of the difficult economic environment impacting the publishing industry." OUP employs roughly 700 people in the U.S., and publishes approximately 500 new titles a year, approximately half of which are monographs. OUP spokesperson Christian Purdy said besides shedding jobs, the press was not planning any dramatic cuts to its publishing program or to any other strategic initiatives. Purdy said the cut was made in anticipation of a reduction in state and library budgets for next year.

• Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Definitive Collection DVD Box Set. Fans of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who solves crimes using his little grey cells, will adore this fabulous boxed set of the BBC series which starred the brilliant David Suchet.
  
  
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children's Books, 3rd Edition by Harold D. Underdown (Alpha Books)
  
  
• A Silent Ocean Away by DeVa Gantt (Avon), a breathtaking saga of an extraordinary American family.
  
  
• Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon, an ingenious and mirthful exploration of small-town America. (Little, Brown)

Publishers now on board include Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette and Penguin Group USA. Having these big names is a big step forward for iTunes itself in becoming an e-book shop and the iPhone in becoming a legitimate e-book reader and competitor to products like the Kindle and the Sony E-Reader.

The first official books will begin to roll out Monday and include titles such as Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight," Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" and a number of others by Christopher Paolini, Brad Meltzer and Scott Westerfeld. There are already several e-book readers in the app store, as well as a number of out-of-copyright e-books, but ScrollMotion's product is unique in that these are stand-alone and newer in-copyright titles and best-selling novels.

Each book is a separate application using Scroll Motion's new reader technology called Iceberg and is wrapped only in the FairPlay iTunes DRM, putting Apple directly into the e-book business by allowing them to pick up a certain percentage of each sale.

The "Australia" helmer has purchased the rights to "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald's tome of the Roaring Twenties. While a script does not yet exist, Luhrmann intends to focus on it after "Australia's" awards run. No studio is attached yet. Fitzgerald's novel of American excess has spawned a Broadway play and multiple films, including Jack Clayton's 1974 pic starring Robert Redford and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola.

The collection written by Daniel Dafoe was donated to the university's manuscripts, archives and rare books library by Emory alumnus Robert Lovett and his wife, Miriam. Robert Lovett spent much of his career gathering rare and unique editions of the celebrated book.

The collection includes five 18th-century editions only available at Emory. One copy is a first edition published in London in 1719, the year the novel came out.

Random House has announced plans to add 6,000 backlist titles to its current e-book library. With these additions, Random House will have nearly 15,000 titles available in the digital format. (The house, which is the biggest trade publisher in the world, is already one of the largest e-book publishers.) Random will also, for the first time, make its entire catalog of both new and existing titles, available in the emerging standard format for the industry, e-Pub.

Among the titles being digitzed, which include those from the children's and adult divisions, are books by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Coben, Louis L'Amour, John Updike, Mary Pope Osborne and Barbara Park. Markus Dohle, chairman and CEO of Random, said the publisher is "making significant investments in the digital future" with moves such as this one.

• Fiction: Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
• Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Poetry: Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
• Young People's Literature: Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's panoramic 1981 allegory of the birth of modern India, is heading for the big screen. Deepa Mehta is to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author, and the film is expected to start production in 2010, it was announced in New York yesterday.

Rushdie's novel, which has been selected twice as the best-ever Booker prize winner, is widely regarded as one of the premier literary works of the latter half of the 20th century and is required reading on most university syllabuses. Often associated with another masterpiece of magic realism, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, the story begins with the birth of Saleem Sinai at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Far from a picaresque Everyman, Saleem discovers he shares special powers with every other person born in the same hour and comes to see himself as the incarnation of India, an avatar of the nation. With its bravura mix of historical events and inventive flights of fancy, the 650-page novel has long been seen as unfilmable.

Reached at home in Toronto, Mehta rejected any such concerns. "If I was doing it myself it would be rather daunting," she said. "The fact that we like and respect each other is a good foundation for collaboration."

The pair will begin writing the screen adaptation in mid-March, with Rushdie and Mehta's partner, David Hamilton, acting as co-producers. Hamilton said he had had preliminary discussions with two Hollywood studios, both of which were keen to see the fruits of the Rushdie-Mehta pairing. But, he added, the script would dictate the ultimate response.

The agreement, which is still subject to approval from the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, will see Google paying out $125m in total, of which a minimum of $45m will go to authors and publishers whose books were digitised without their approval. Google will also pay $34.5m to establish a book rights registry, and will cover legal fees.

Authors Guild president Roy Blount Jr said the deal made "good sense". "As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work," he said. "It's hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it."

The agreement follows outrage from American publishers and authors three years ago, when they learnt of agreements struck by Google with certain American universities to scan books which were still in copyright, which would then be digitised and searchable online. American authors' body the Authors Guild led the charge against the search engine, filing suit in September 2005 along with a number of authors.

Under the terms of the agreement, US readers will be able to preview up to 20% of most out-of-print books for free, with authors and rights holders of in-copyright but out of print works able to opt out of the arrangement if they choose.

For in-copyright books that are still in print, readers will be able to find the books, but will not be able to view any portion of it unless its publisher has signed up to Google's partner programme.

The 61-year-old novelist said he had always tried to ask big questions about the role of the individual in history and society. "The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history or does history make us? Do we shape the world or are we just shaped by it?" Rushdie said in an interview published Wednesday.

He said the question of whether individuals acted with free will or were passive victims of events "is, I think, a great question and one that I have always tried to ask" in novels like "The Satanic Verses." "In that sense I wouldn't not have wanted to be the writer that asked it," he said.

The interview ran in The Times newspaper to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the novel's publication. "The Satanic Verses," Rushdie's fourth novel, referred to a legend about Muhammad being tricked by agents of the devil. It enraged some Muslims, was banned in India, burned by demonstrators in England and brought a death sentence for blasphemy from Iran's then-leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The book centers on a 90-year-old man reminiscing about his time at a B-level circus taking care of the animals. He sees the brutality of circus life while falling for the wife of an abusive animal trainer.

The book spent 12 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in 2006 and hit the list again last year when it was released in paperback. More than 2 million paperbacks have been sold, according to the studio.

A Grafton, Wis., woman said she never expected to be led away from her home in handcuffs simply for failing to return two overdue library books. Heidi Dalibor admitted to ignoring four notices from the library in addition to two phone calls, two letters and a citation that included a court date, WISN-TV, Milwaukee, reported Friday. "I said, what could they possibly do? They can't arrest me for this... I was wrong," Dalibor said.

Dalibor was released after paying her $170 fine. "I completely take responsibility for not paying my fine on time and not going to my court date," Dalibor said. However, the woman said the library will now never get the copies of "White Oleander" and "Angels and Demons" back on their shelves. "I still have the books and I don't plan to return them because they're paid for now," Dalibor said.

You can tell people until you're blue in the face how good a book is, and the chances are most of your friends won't even bother to pick it up. But then the film comes out and suddenly everyone's an expert. The story has been plucked from its secret place where only those willing to go the distance of several hundred pages can find it and thrust into the attention-deficit glare of mainstream culture for quite literally anyone to come along and "love" just as much as you do... for a week, anyway.

*****

Some of us who love particular writers have more of this pain than other readers.....how many times can you try to tell your movie-going friends that, actually, We Can Remember it For You Wholesale is a classic discussion of reality, identity and memory, and not just a Steven Seagal-level action flick called Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

If anything, the graphic novel reader can enjoy an even higher level of elitism than the ordinary bibliophile - you generally have to go to even greater lengths to find your reading matter. So anyone who has bought - on import, in monthly instalments - the output of British comic writer Alan Moore over the years will no doubt have been dismayed by great works such as V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell reduced to CGI-laden momentary distractions for a Thursday evening when there's nothing on the telly.

"Libraries are facing competition from television, magazines, the internet, e-books, yet they have this archaic and mad idea of charging people money for being slightly late," said library consultant Frances Hendrix - a loud voice in the debate which has been taking place on an online forum for librarians. "It's all so negative, unprofessional and unbusinesslike; like any business, libraries need not to alienate their customers." Liz Dubber, director of programmes at reading charity The Reading Agency, agreed. "My personal view [is that] they're past their sell-by date because they do sustain a very old-fashioned image of libraries which is out of sync with today's modern library environment and the image libraries are trying to project - tolerant, responsive, flexible, stimulating," she said.

*****

The other side of the debate points out that without fines, customers are unlikely to return their books. Alison Wheeler, adult services manager at Suffolk Libraries, told the Guardian that her personal view was that some people do need the "occasional financial nudge" to remind them about doing the right thing. "No one would argue against a parking or speeding fine -- if we didn't have speeding fines it wouldn't mean that people behaved better on the roads," she added.

Miramax Film Corp filed its suit for breach of contract against Pearson on Friday in Manhattan Federal Court, according to Reuters, saying that although Pearson accepted $700,000 in August 2003 under a two-year contract, she has still not delivered the novel. Miramax also said that Pearson has ignored its requests for information about the book's whereabouts since 2006.

I Think I Love You, which Pearson's agent said she believed Pearson would still deliver "but I don't know what deadline she has set herself", is described by its UK publisher Chatto as being "about love in many forms, but first love in particular, how it shapes us and imprints us". Pearson signed a deal for the book with Chatto in 2003. A spokesperson for the publisher said he had "absolutely no information whatsoever" on when it might be published; Amazon lists publication dates between July 2006 and February 2009.

"'The First Circle' is one of the most important novels of the 20th century and we are thrilled to be making this masterpiece available in its full glory," Carrie Kania, senior vice president and publisher of Harper Perennial, said Tuesday in a statement.

Harper Perennial, a paperback imprint of HarperCollins, will release The First Circle in 2009. The 89-year-old Solzhenitsyn, winner in 1970 of the Nobel Prize for literature, returned to his homeland in the 1990s after two decades in exile and now lives in Moscow.

The former Simple Life star exclusively tells E! News that a TV show based on her 2005 coming-of-age novel The Truth About Diamonds is in the works and she's gearing up to be a part of the production.

"I would definitely produce and definitely be in the show," the socialite says, although she stopped short of saying she would play the lead, adding, "I don't know if I need to be the star of this show. "I've got a lot going on right now."

Richie's thinly veiled memoir tells the story of twentysomething Chloe Parker, who was adopted by a music superstar when she was 7 and as a young adult finds herself running with an elite Hollywood party crowd in between run-ins with the police, tabloid rumors and a stint in rehab. Throughout, Chloe struggles to maintain her integrity and sobriety as the people she thought she could trust angle to get a piece of her.

"Midnight's Children" won the Booker Prize in 1981, and the Indian-born writer was hot favorite to take the award decided by the public from a shortlist of six in an online poll. The 61-year-old, whose 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, also won the 25th anniversary Booker prize in 1993.

"I think it was an extraordinary shortlist and it was an honor to be on it," Rushdie said in a recorded message from the United States, where he is on a book tour. His sons, Zafar and Milan, accepted a trophy in London on his behalf, and the author said it was apt that "my real children (are) accepting a prize for my imaginary children." Milan, the youngest, added: "I'm really looking forward to reading it when I'm older. Well done Dad."

Victoria Glendinning, chair of the panel who drew up a shortlist, said the entries were dominated by themes of the end of empire and two world wars. "These are the nettles we have been compelled to try and grasp," she told reporters. But there was some criticism of the award, partly because the choice was narrowed to just six nominees. "It's an artificial exercise, simply because the general public only got to pick from six of the previous winners," said Jonathan Ruppin, promotions manager at Foyles bookshop.

In what will be a shock to writers and publishers, Lahiri's collection of eight stories examining different aspects of the Bengali migrant experience has seen off authors including Booker winners Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle. But the book is already a publishing sensation: published this spring, it went straight into the New York Times's fiction charts at number one. It is an unprecedented feat for a short story writer which the paper compared to "a comet landing", so rarely does a serious writer make this kind of commercial impact. Indeed, unusual success has been the hallmark of her career since she published her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999, winning the Pulitzer prize and selling 600,000 copies - another very rare feat.

The triple-decker edition was inscribed on behalf of Austen to her close confidante, the governess Anne Sharp. One of only 12 presentation copies printed, which otherwise went to family members and publisher John Murray's contacts, it was the only one given to a friend of the author. Yesterday's auction at Bonhams in London was won by an anonymous British bidder, outstripping an anticipated sale price of £50-£70,000, the highest price ever paid for an Austen novel, and comfortably ahead of the £114,000 fetched by a first edition of Wuthering Heights last November.

The Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit organization supported by the publishing industry, projects a 3 percent to 4 percent growth through 2011, when revenues should top $43 billion. The BISG expects little change in the actual number of books sold and sees a drop in the general trade market by more than 60 million, from 2.282 billion copies in 2007 to 2.220 billion in 2011.

"The hits will keep doing well, but other books will have troubles," says BISG senior researcher Albert N. Greco, a professor of marketing at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business. The findings were announced at BookExpo America, being held this weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Barring another Potter-like phenomenon, Greco believes the children's market will barely break even. Modest gains are projected in most adult categories, although that could change once Brown comes out with his long-awaited follow-up to "The Da Vinci Code." No release date has been set for the novel, which also features protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard University professor who interprets symbols.

The biggest losers likely will be mass market paperbacks, which continue to plunge as baby boomers seek formats with larger print, while religious books should keep growing, by more than 5 percent annually. The hottest market, according to the industry study group, isn't books, but standardized tests, boosted by the requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation. Growth of 8 percent or better is expected through at least 2009.

Google, the Internet's leader in search and advertising, says the process it developed and is using for scanning the majority of the books in Book Search is proprietary. Employees will not discuss it except to say it is much faster than what Mitchel is doing and it's not destructive. "It took us quite a while to develop it so we do keep that confidential," said a library manager for Book Search, Ben Bunnell, who declined even to say where Google does the scanning.

Many libraries began digitizing books a decade ago to preserve them. Funding from Google allows the 28 libraries it's working with to cut their digitizing costs because they don't have to pay for scanning the books Google wants to include in Book Search.

Through Book Search, users can track down a book on any topic they're interested in and read a small portion. If the book's not protected by copyright, users can download the whole thing. If it is, or if they just want to read an original, they can use Book Search to find copies to buy or borrow. More than 1 million rare or fragile books have been digitized through the Google-Michigan partnership since it began in 2004, with an estimated 6 million to go.

Lily Allen was never the most obvious pick to judge a major literary prize. She's famous not for her views on novels but for a song about London that doesn't even spell out the city's whole name. That didn't stop the organisers of the Orange Broadband prize (awarded for the best novel in English by a woman). In December, they added Allen's name to a judging panel alongside broadcaster Kirsty Lang, journalist Bel Mooney, novelist Philippa Gregory and the Guardian's Lisa Allardice.

Lily Allen was never the most obvious pick to judge a major literary prize. She's famous not for her views on novels but for a song about London that doesn't even spell out the city's whole name. That didn't stop the organisers of the Orange Broadband prize (awarded for the best novel in English by a woman). In December, they added Allen's name to a judging panel alongside broadcaster Kirsty Lang, journalist Bel Mooney, novelist Philippa Gregory and the Guardian's Lisa Allardice.

Many lit snobs squawked, wondering what a 22-year-old pop singer would bring to the table -- other than chewing gum and photographers' flash-bulbs. And now, well, they can stop squawking. Because Lily Allen's out. "It is with deep regret that Lily Allen has withdrawn from the judging panel," Allen's manager told the Daily Mail this weekend. "Lily had read extensively for the first stage of the judging process and was looking forward to the shortlist meeting but recently found that she was unable to commit 100% to the role due to ill-health."

Allen did not attend a judges' meeting last month to discuss the 20-book longlist, according to the Daily Mail. Instead she participated by telephone. Allen also missed a debate last week to decide the shortlist. "Lily hopes that her withdrawal will not detract from the huge importance of the Orange prize and sends her sincere apologies to her fellow judges and to the individual authors," her manager added.

At least since Dante's Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date's taste in books is "actually a pretty good way -- as a sort of first pass -- of getting a sense of someone," said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives. "It's a bit of a Rorschach test." To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. "It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is," Fels said. "It speaks to class, educational level."

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore -- or a phony. "Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport," Augusten Burroughs, the author of Running With Scissors and other vivid memoirs, said. "Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough." The author recalled a date with one Michael, a "robust blond from Germany." As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, "I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of Proust by Samuel Beckett." That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. "If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one's education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn't imagine it."

Viewing modern adaptations was found to be as popular as teachers might have suspected, according to the YouGov poll. With both texts regularly figuring in secondary school English classes, it is no surprise that Baz Luhrmann's Romeo And Juliet and the BBC's Pride And Prejudice were frequently watched. Londoners were the worst culprits, with 16% admitting to using the films to sidestep the texts, the poll commissioned by academic bookseller Blackwell found.

Two-thirds of Britons were unaware that films such as Ten Things I Hate About You and Clueless were actually adaptations. But despite one-third of adults admitting they never read the classics, there are those who think modern life is imitating the traditional. Dickensian Britain has been reborn in the modern binge-drinking culture, according to 54% of those surveyed.

And 47% believe that many young people are suffering from Peter Pan syndrome, unwilling to grow up just as in JM Barrie's classic novel. There is also evidence that the "wag" culture may not be such a new phenomenon - 30% believe that trying to find a rich husband mirrors the themes of Jane Austen's novels.

Phil Jamieson, head of marketing at Blackwell, said: "Classic books are timeless. You will find contemporary themes such as love, sex, murder, mystery and high-octane drama in all the great novels, which is why they still appeal to the masses to this day through films and have parallels with our daily lives."

Former Avon and Berkley publisher Lou Aronica and agent Peter Miller are creating The Story Plant, a publishing company focused on "commercial fiction and author development," intending to "develop writers over multiple books" and "focus on long-term relationships with commercial novelists." Distributed by Perseus Distribution, the line launches this fall with Sienna Skyy's AMERICAN QUEST, a contemporary romantic fantasy, and Jonathan Javitt's medical thriller CAPITOL REFLECTIONS.

Miller, who serves as marketing and rights director for the company, says in the announcement, "When we sign a Story Plant title, we're specifically looking at the book's film and foreign potential. We think the books on this list are going to be successful on a number of platforms." Foreign rights are being sold by Baror International.

The Best of the Booker, a one-off award, is announced today to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Booker Prize. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction recognises and is awarded for the best novel of the year; and now The Best of the Booker will honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded on 22 April 1969.

This is only the second time that a celebratory award has been created. The first was in 1993 - the 25th anniversary - when Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers with Midnight's Children. However, unlike then, this time the public will be able to cast their vote.

In all, 41 novelists have won the prize over the years because in 1974 and 1992 there were two winners. In 1974 Nadine Gordimer won with The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton with Holiday. In 1992 Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient shared the top spot with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.

For The Best of the Booker, a panel of judges has been appointed to select a shortlist of six novels. They are biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, (Chair); writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL. Their shortlist will be announced in May, and public voting will then begin via the Man Booker Prize website - www.themanbookerprize.com.

He is happy with the movie version of his best-selling novel Atonement— though he concedes that, at first, he had reservations about its big budget and the medium of film itself. The British author now praises director Joe Wright's "lush visual sense" and "real sense and eye for instinct, for the emotional heart." And he appreciates screenwriter Christopher Hampton's ability to incorporate details from the book into the screenplay.

*****

The film's only actor to be nominated is 13-year-old Irish actress Saoirse Ronan. And McEwan is impressed by her handling of the novel's key character, Briony, who falsely accuses her sister's lover of a rape. "Even if you couldn't have access to her mind, you really got the sense of her mind just turning," McEwan said Tuesday at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival. "And I think that's really important to the success of the film."

The 59-year-old Booker prize winner added that the movie's other two stars, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, "worked marvelously together. ...Joe Wright turned out to be an absolutely superb caster." McEwan says he was initially skeptical of the movie's $40 million budget, worrying that the big investment would allow commercial considerations, such as pressure to cast marketable stars, to trump artistic integrity. But, he says, "all my fears were allayed."

Story follows a newspaper editor (Broderick) demoted from politics to comics after a debilitating concussion. He links up with his uncle (Alda) and his high school sweetheart (Madsen) and goes on a road trip to sell what may be a valuable baseball card.

In addition to directing credit for the feature "Kubuku Rides" Kinney acted in the films "Save the Last Dance" and "Sleepers", was a regular on HBO's "OZ," co-founded Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, and appeared on the Rialto in "The Grapes of Wrath."

Ms. Golomb, who represented Ms. Pessl in the sale of "Special Topics," said in an interview last week that Ms. Gibson's book is set in a wealthy community on the North shore of Long Island, and centers around a 16-year-old girl who struggles with the "terribly materialistic world" in which she lives. Like her classmates, Ms. Golomb said, the girl does not like to read, and her parents, in an attempt to get her to embrace literature, hire someone to write a book fitted specifically to her taste and sensibility.

Ms. Golomb said A Book for Carley, which was acquired by Dutton editor-in-chief Trena Keating, was written with a sort of "heightened wit" and precocious dialogue reminiscent of Special Topics and the film Juno.

"The real message of the book is that literature is something that can really inform your life and your life choices and your feelings about yourself, and it's kind of a rallying cry for children and teenagers and all of us to continue to read because it's not just some dry thing that's good for you," Ms. Golomb said. "That's the kind of thing that the publishing community can really get behind and it’s very popular with book clubs."

Egypt has banned a number of Western and secular books from the 40th Cairo International Book Fair, including works by Czech author Milan Kundera and Morocco's Mohamed Choukri, publishers said on Monday.

The Cairo book fair, the Arab world's largest, is dominated by Islamist and educational works, an AFP correspondent reported, and the authorities have not said why the other works were seized at Cairo airport.

"The Egyptian authorities have given no explanation, we were neither informed nor consulted about this measure and the books have not been returned to us," said Rana Idriss, director of Lebanese publishing house Dar al-Adab.