Lorin Stein, who has been an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux since 1998, will be the next editor of the Paris Review, the literary journal announced Friday.

“Lorin has an uncommon literary sensibility and eye for new talent,” publisher Antonio Weiss said in a news  release.  “We look forward to achieving new heights under Lorin’s leadership."

Stein succeeds Philip Gourevitch, who has helmed the Paris Review for five years. Gourevitch announced his departure last year to return to writing.

As an editor, Stein has a noteworthy lineup of authors, including Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Lydia Davis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sam Lipsyte and Richard Price. Books he's edited have received the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Believer Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

In the release, Stein said that the Paris Review “stands for the newest, the best, the most daring in writing and art, and that’s been the case now for more than 50 years. To be entrusted with that tradition is a true honor.”

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Tim Burton is a visual genius. In another century, he would have been a painter ... or no, a diorama artist, the kind of person who would have had his own Wonder Cabinet, that precursor to the modern natural history museum.

What Burton isn't, however, is a storyteller. Of his films, I can count on less than five fingers ("The Nightmare Before Christmas," "Beetlejuice," "Batman Returns," "Sweeney Todd" ) those that don't collapse under their own lack of narrative urgency. Unfortunately, "Alice in Wonderland," which opens Friday, is not among them; it's a beautiful movie, but one that ultimately has an empty core. Yet unlike other Burton movies, the problem isn't that the story tries to do too little, but that it tries to do too much.

That's because "Alice in Wonderland" operates from a flawed premise -- it is not an adaptation so much as an extrapolation, even a sequel in its way. In this version, Alice is a young adult, almost 20, and her visit to Wonderland is not a journey of discovery but a return to a place she visited as a girl and then forgot. Gone is the delightful meandering quality of the original, in favor of a tortured saga of good and evil, conquest and redemption, ending in a battle straight out of a "Narnia" film. Gone is all the trippy innocence; if there's a druggy vibe to this movie, it's less the dreaminess of opium than the scorched-earth violence of meth.

To be fair, Burton has always operated from a dark vision, but in his best work, he leavens it with a macabre light. There are traces of that here (mostly in Johnny Depp's delightful turn as the Mad Hatter), but for the most part, it's a joyless trip to Wonderland -- or Underland, as we're informed it's actually called. The whole exercise raises a couple of inescapable questions, beginning with the age-old one about why Hollywood always has to "improve" everything; why it can't leave well enough alone.

But more to the point, if -- like Burton -- narrative is not your strong suit, why mess with what has been, since its original publication 145 years ago, a story universally beloved?

-- David L. Ulin

This week, in a post about the 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile over the weekend, GalleyCat quoted the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño on the unbearable lightness of seismicity.

"Sometimes," Bolaño observed, "the earth shakes. ... The epicenter of the quake is somewhere in the north or the south, but I can still hear the shaking. Sometimes I feel dizzy. Sometimes the quake goes on for longer than usual and people take shelter under doorways or under stairs or they rush out into the streets. Is there a solution?"

That's a nice enough riff, but when I think of writers on Chilean earthquakes, it's less Bolaño who comes to mind than the German author Heinrich von Kleist, whose story "The Earthquake in Chile," published in 1807, takes place in the immediate aftermath of another 8.8 quake, which hit Santiago in 1647. Kleist is widely regarded as a romantic, but really, he's too cynical about human nature, too aware of the influence of coincidence and the capricious rectitude that passes as morality.

In "The Earthquake in Chile," a couple condemned for their forbidden love are reunited when the massive quake frees them; they move through the shattered landscape of Santiago with their infant son, only to be brutally killed by an angry mob after a sermon at the city's only standing church blames them for the cataclysm. It's a bleak vision, but not altogether alien even now; just look at comments by Pat Robertson and the Rev. Bill Shuler in the wake of January's Haiti earthquake that somehow God's wrath had been the cause.

But more to the point is the acuity of Kleist's writing, his evocation of the uncertainty and terror of a massive earthquake, which mirrors, in its own way, the uncertainty and terror of being alive. He writes:

He was scarcely outside when a second tremor completely demolished the already subsiding street. Panic-stricken, with no idea of how to save himself from this general doom, he ran on over wreckage and fallen timber towards one of the nearest city gates, while death assailed him from all directions. Here another house caved in, scattering its debris far and wide and driving him into a side street; here flames, flashing through clouds of smoke, were licking out of every gable and chased him in terror into another; here the Mapocho river, overflowing its banks, rolled roaring towards him and forced him into a third. Here lay a heap of corpses, there a voice still moaned under the rubble, here people were screaming on burning house-tops, there men and animals were struggling in the floodwater, here a brave rescuer tried to help and there stood another man, pale as death, speechlessly extending his trembling hands to heaven. When Jerónimo had reached the gate and climbed a hill beyond it, he fell down at the top in a dead faint.

-- David L. Ulin

Photo: Santiago, Chile, on Feb. 27. Credit: Carlos Espinoza / Associated Press

Archaeological evidence of vampires -- really? Once the venerable National Geographic got into the vampire game, it became clear that vampire lore has saturated our culture. In an episode of the show "Explorer" broadcast late last month, National Geographic looked at a skull from a recently discovered 16th century mass grave near Venice. What they found wasn't evidence of vampires themselves, but of people who seemed to have died according to the rituals and legends of how vampires should be killed.

As if that weren't enough, we now have Honest Abe as a vampire slayer. In today's paper, Gina McIntyre writes that Seth Grahame-Smith -- the man who brought us the zombie-Jane Austen mashup "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" -- has made his follow-up, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," a genuinely entertaining and worthwhile read. McIntyre writes:

Grahame-Smith's sophomore effort outlasts the kitsch value of its title, and freed from the constraints of updating (or defacing, depending on one's viewpoint) a revered literary gem, the writer delivers a well-constructed, surprisingly satisfying narrative that straight-faces its absurd premise: that Honest Abe, the 16th president of the United States, led a secret life slaying the fanged undead....

at a time when the market is flooded with vampire titles, most of them young adult romances, a writer who can transform the greatest figure from 19th century American history into the star of an original vampire tale with humor, heart and bite is a rare find indeed.

Young adult vampire romances -- right, "Twilight." Oh, you all know about "Twilight." Books from the "Twilight" saga seemed to have earned a permanent place in the Amazon top 20 bestseller list, but today they're not there. Instead, Grahame-Smith's vampire book is -- as of this writing, it's at No. 19.

Not to be left out, National Geographic has a book too: by historian Mark Collins Jenkins, it's called "Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

In a ceremony at the New School in New York City on Wednesday night, Daniyal Mueenuddin was awarded the 2009 Story Prize for his collection "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders." The collection has received many commendations -- it was a finalist for the National Book Award and is nominated for the L.A. Times book prize for first fiction -- and Mueenuddin has been running to keep up with them. He splits his time between his farm in Pakistan -- the setting for the stories in his book -- and cities like New York and London.

"At the farm, there's nothing that distracts me. There's nothing to do there," he said after the awards ceremony. Mueenuddin has plenty of responsibilities in Pakistan -- he manages the large farm -- but beyond that, he's got nothing but time to work. "I write in the morning and farm in the afternoon."

But away from the farm, there is nothing but distraction. Friends and fans gathered around him after the awards announcement, one a former classmate from his MFA program at the University of Arizona (he also has a law degree from Yale). There's the travel -- Thursday morning he heads back to London, where his wife is studying. E-mails come pouring in, so many that he's considering going offline to refocus on his writing.

"You can make a choice if you're a romantic or a cynic," Mueenuddin had explained earlier in an onstage interview with the Story Prize's Larry Dark. "And you end up being happier if you're a romantic." The stories in his collection, which have a timeless feel, illuminate feudal Pakistan and its decay. "I'm a romantic and I love nostalgia -- that's one of the things that makes me write. Therefore I look back." 

The Story Prize comes with a substantial award -- $20,000 to the winner and $5,000 each to the two other finalists -- and has three judges, including, this year, me. It is designed to bring attention to superb short fictionand is designed to bring attention to superb short fiction. Short stories are often thought of as getting short shrift: the old sow in publishing is that they don't sell, that readers don't want them. Maybe this isn't entirely true -- collections by Jhumpa Lahiri make bestseller lists. After more than 20 novels, megaseller John Grisham has just published his first collection of short stories. And when Oprah picked  "Say You're One of Them" by Uwem Akpan for her popular book club last year, it was the first time she'd selected a short story collection.

Standing on a New York sidewalk Wednesday night, Mueenuddin lit up a cigarette. "I love writing short stories," he began. "My wife has to keep telling me -- he stopped midsentence as writer Colson Whitehead stepped outside; the two hadn't seen each other since they did a dual book-signing for the New Yorker Festival in October. Whatever Mueenuddin's wife has been telling him about short fiction was lost to the flurry of the life of a very busy writer.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: W.W. Norton and Co.

The 20th annual Abu Dhabi International Book Fair got started Tuesday; it will continue through March 7. This year, there are more than 800 exhibitors. The book fair is open to the public.

"Every year we see more and more visitors coming to the fair," Mariam Salabbai of the Al Mutannabi Bookshop in UAE told the Gulf News. "This proves that people still like to read hard copies of books and we hope that this year that even more visitors come and take a look at what's available."

To kick off the fair, the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction was announced. The winner is "Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles," a satire by Saudi Arabian writer Abdo Khal. The Guardian reports that the title comes from the Koran -- it's a reference to hell -- and that the author's books are not sold in Saudi Arabia. He expressed surprise to be selected as the winner from the shortlist; the prize comes with a $60,000 award.

In other book fair news, a new book distribution company to serve the Arab world was announced. Publishing Perspectives, an American website focused on international publishing, writes: "The difficulty of distribution has been blamed for inhibiting growth of the book market in the region." The distribution company, Abu Dhabi Distribution, will take on challenges of standardization, which apply to older publications, as well as incorporating new technologies like e-books when it begins operations later this month.

Publishing Perspectives writes:

The reaction to the launch appeared to be hugely enthusiastic; the event drew some fifty people, including some of the biggest names in Arabic-language publishing, as well as foreign companies.

The website 3 Percent is also reporting from Abu Dhabi, and will continue to post news from the Abu Dhabi  Book Fair.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Zayed Mosque. Credit: Ali Haider / EPA

Sam Lipsyte's bitter comedy has got people comparing him to Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. His new book, "The Ask," is out now from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It features Milo Burke, a fundraiser  for the arts program of a third-rate New York university. Our reviewer Akiva Gottlieb explains the setup:

Like the vulgar, irremediable Lewis "Teabag" Miner of Lipsyte's last novel "Home Land" -- perhaps one of the funniest books of the last decade -- Milo clings to the end of his rope, hemmed in by his neuroses, sexual hang-ups and crushing evidence of his own worthlessness. Unlike Teabag, Milo lacks the energy to put up a fight. And crucial to his desperate state of affairs, he's also married with a 3-year-old son. So when Purdy Stuart -- one of "the undercover aristocrats mingling with the peasantry" back in college, now sitting atop an inherited throne raised above the embers of late capitalism -- unexpectedly comes calling, Milo is ready to submit to whatever the man with the cash has in mind.

To help whip people into a Lipsyte frenzy, the publisher is giving away autographed copies of three of his books, including "The Ask," on the Web on the aptly named Sam Lipsyte LipSite.

To enter, all you have to do is sign up for a weekly e-mail, which will deliver snippets of Lipsyte's witty writing to your e-mail box. Expect them to arrive on Wednesdays, the most miserable day of the workweek.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Sam Lipsyte. Credit: Robert Reynolds / Farrar, Straus & Giroux

As goes Sarah Palin, so goes Mitt Romney -- book-wise, at least. The former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential candidate has followed in the footsteps of the former Alaska governor and GOP vice-presidential candidate. His book, "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness," hits shelves Tuesday, and Romney will follow up with a massive book tour. Just like Sarah Palin!

 The Swamp reports:

The Republican's new book carries a critique of the president voiced by others: That Obama has been too willing to apologize around the world for American actions. It lays out a vision for U.S. economic and foreign policy, maintaining that the current course is leading toward weakness and decline.

Romney's 19-state book-promoting tour is carrying him from one cable news network to the others ...and ends with an appearance at the "Late Show with David Letterman" -- where Romney will be up against another author whose designs for 2012 remain less clear than Romney's own intentions, Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president, who has a date with Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show."

Romney seems to be setting his book up in opposition to Palin. "I don't pretend this is going to be a bestseller," he told the Boston Globe.

“I think Sarah Palin, they printed 2 million books. We’re printing like 100,000 books," said Romney. (An aide later corrected him: the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, has already committed to print twice that number.)

“Frankly, if I were wanting to simply sell copies of books and get the highest number sold, describing a personal history would be a more interesting read for most folks," he continued. “But for those that are very interested in geopolitics and the way our economy works, this is going to be a more interesting book."

Sounds like a preview of rhetoric in the race for the 2012 Republican nomination for president. But so far, nobody's running -- it's just a friendly competition between politicians and their books.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Mitt Romney in January. Credit: Robert Giroux / Getty Images

Author Barry Hannah died on Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss.  He was 67. The county coroner said Hannah died of natural causes.

Hannah, who was born in Mississippi, broke onto the literary stage in 1972 when his debut novel, "Geronimo Rex," was nominated for a National Book Award and won the William Faulkner prize. Harry Crews, reviewing the book for the L.A. Times, compared Hannah with Flannery O'Connor in his gift for dark humor.

But none of this really does justice to the book or gives any very accurate sense of what the book is. So say it another way: say, "Geronimo Rex" is a lyrical, half-crazed song about growing up in the South during the '50s and '60s. Barry Hannah's exact eye, and the language bringing life to what his eye has seen, is what makes the book worth reading.

Hannah's refreshing language also struck Richard Ford, who told the Associated Press: "Barry could somehow make the English sentence generous and unpredictable, yet still make wonderful sense, which for readers is thrilling. You never knew the source of the next word."

Hannah wrote novels and short fiction, and taught writing at various institutions, including Clemson, the University of Iowa and the University of Mississippi, where he directed the writing program. He worked briefly in Hollywood, collaborating, without much result, with director Robert Altman.

These are things that many writers might have done, but Hannah was unique: He had an outsized, gregarious persona. For a time, he was known for his hard drinking. It was even part of his writing process, he reluctantly told the Paris Review:

Teaching at Clemson was very hard work. I’d come home, put down the babies — and I was trying to be a good father and I think I was — but then that freedom, it was astonishing, my God. Every man or woman who comes home and takes a glass of wine or a couple of hits of bourbon on the rocks knows what I mean. Just this total loosening and release from the white noise of the day, so that you enter another zone. Instead of going to sleep I would hit the typewriter and sometimes write until four and teach my classes very haggardly. But I was often taught that everything is worth it for art. Everything. It was a cult. ... So yeah, I learned things that way, but on the other hand I would have learned things had I been sober.

In 1983, Hannah published "The Tennis Handsome." The novel, our reviewer wrote, "spins wildly around four men from Vicksburg, Miss., a town so full of aberration that it makes Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County seem like Pasadena in the 1950s." Hannah had settled in Faulkner's hometown, and the author's presence was a good one for the community, he explained in a 1996 interview:

What I like is the high mark that is expected after Faulkner. You don’t have to love Faulkner, but there is a high mark that folks shoot for. It’s very strange in the poorest, probably the most illiterate, state in the union to have a town where this kind of excellence is expected.

That year, Hannah's short story collection, "High Lonesome," was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2003, he won the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story.

In our pages in 1972, Harry Crews wrote "I enjoyed the book. I recommend the book. And I think, for what it's worth, Barry Hannah is destined to write some very fine things before it's all over." Indeed, he did.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Barry Hannah at home in 1988. Credit: Robert Jordan / University of Mississippi/Associated Press

Publisher Henry Holt & Co. today announced the withdrawal of the book "The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back" by Charles Pellegrino. Parts of the book, which had received strong positive attention from NPR, the New York Times and other media outlets, have come under question

Pellegrino says he was duped by one source, the now-deceased Joseph Fuoco. Fuoco claimed he was a flight engineer on one of the planes accompanying the Enola Gay, serving as a last-minute substitute for James R. Corliss. Veterans of the 509th Composite Group, which was formed to conduct the two atomic bombings against Japan, have produced evidence to the contrary and disputed many other elements in the book.

In February, Pellegrino spoke to the New York Times, saying he was "stunned" that Fuoco, who died in 2008, had been an imposter. "I liked and admired the guy. He had loads and loads of papers, and photographs of everything."

Initially, Henry Holt was going to issue corrected versions of the book, but it took a hard look at the entire contents of the book -- and at Pellegrino. "Questions about other sources and the author’s credentials arose," the publisher wrote in today's press release. There is no evidence that one person who appears in the book actually existed; Pellegrino says that he knew that already because he'd invented a pseudonym and forgot to mention it. Maybe there is as simple an explanation for the concerns over his C.V.: Pellegrino's website says that he earned a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 1982, a detail that has not been confirmed.

How is it that a book that took years to write, edit and correct made it all the way to shelves without anyone checking the facts of Fuoco's claims? Should Pellegrino have dug deeper? After the memoir scandals of James Frey, J.T. Leroy and Margaret B. Jones, and the recent recall of Herman Rosenblat's Holocaust memoir "Angel at the Fence," is it the publisher's job to check every claim, every statement, for accuracy?

Maybe. But maybe they just can't. Denis Johnson, publisher of the independent Melville House, writes:

...at some point, the publisher must make the same leap of faith in an author that a book critic makes in deciding to review a book. In this instance, that leap was based partly on the track record of the author (Pellegrino has published 12 books). And after all, who would suspect a fairly reputable historian of failing to undertake the most rudimentary research on such a sensitive story?

"The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back" and author Pellegrino may have gotten extra attention with the news that "Avatar" director James Cameron, with whom Pellegrino had worked before, had optioned the book. While it's admirable that the publisher will take the historically inaccurate book from the shelves, it's hard not to wonder about how rigorously publishers can fact-check the books that aren't so much in the spotlight.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: An Allied corresponded surveys the rubble of Hiroshima, 32 days after the 1945 atomic blast. Credit: Associated Press

For many years, people have known where to find John McPhee -- in the pages of the New Yorker, teaching at Princeton -- but one place they didn't expect to see him was in the media. Famously interview-shy, McPhee even removes himself, elegantly, from his nonfiction.

Until now. His new collection, "Silk Parachute," includes the 78-year-old author as a real presence. And he's talking to the media: Susan Salter Reynolds interviewed him for Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

In the past, McPhee's strategy had been to explain a little bit about why he is writing -- about oranges, tennis, trains, geology, fish, Bill Bradley, David Brower, you name it -- and then get out of the frame. Sure, he leaves traces: We feel we might know his voice if we heard it in a coffee shop, and we can taste his presence, his influence over a generation of journalists and essayists. But we would not recognize him if he were seated next to us....

McPhee, who normally bicycles 15 to 16 miles every other day for exercise and is rarely idle, blames recent hand surgeries, with the attendant resting and medication required, for the fault line that has opened up. "I just started writing. I guess I'm not used to all that spare time," he says, surprised. "I usually know where I'm going with a story. A novelist can feel her way with a story, but that's not the case in nonfiction. It's a central theme of the course I teach: Know where you're going." ...

McPhee has described writing as "mind-fracturing, self-enslaved labor." Each day, he says, brings a "new form of writer's block." He elaborates: "You suspend the normal world to reproduce the normal world. It is a suspension of ordinary life."

Read the complete article here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: John McPhee in Princeton, N.J., in February. Credit: Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

People spend years learning animation and acting, but you don't need those skills with a Web tool by xtranormal. All it takes is typing a little dialogue, picking some characters, and bingo! You have a robot-voiced key scene from "Pride and Prejudice."

Jane Austen's classic work is fair game -- for this and for zombie mashups -- because it's in the public domain. Most other classic literature is too -- think Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, "The Tale of Genji." What works best is a conversation between two characters -- like good screenwriters know, there isn't much room for description in a script.

Because the choices are two characters or just one, the text of a first-person novel might work, like, for example, "Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

There are no particularly 16th-century characters to choose from; instead there are robots and superheroes and bears and even Sarah Palin. Each character comes with a few appropriate sets, and the director can add gestures, expressions and pauses. With a single button, you can let the program do all the camerawork -- it does a good job -- or you can get in there and start mucking around, dictating shots. A soundtrack can be added, too.

There were some drawbacks: Darcy mumbles the word "thus," no matter how much I asked him not to; the characters' movements are limited, and the voices are clearly computer-generated. It's not the most refined version of Austen's work put to screen, but hey, it's free -- and I just made a Jane Austen movie!

You don't have to use classic literature. Write your own dialogue or transcribe an IM conversation with a permission-granting friend. If you do make a video with classic lit, though, please let us know in the comments, so we can watch and enjoy your version of bears as Tristram Shandy.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's poetry collection, "Apocalyptic Swing," has been nominated for a 2009 LA Times book prize. The poet spoke to Memorious, an online journal of poetry and literature, about what was on her mind: Alexander McQueen, queer culture, New York's meatpacking district before its gentrification, and the song above, by Regina Spektor.

"I’ve been listening to Regina Spektor’s “Dance Anthem of the 80’s.” I keep playing the section from 2:03 till the end, which is something I do. I find the spot in the song that has all the tension and contradiction and sometimes just explosive beauty of what I want to make. So I’ve been playing that over and over and dreaming of all of us. Listen. It gets so quiet and she’s just looking at you and the boys and girls stop for a second and then it opens and opens and we’re dancing and laughing."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Publishers John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, Reed Elsevier, Pearson and Cengage Learning have won a judgment in a German court against Switzerland-based RapidShare. Our Technology blog reports:

Book piracy has become a growing concern for publishers as they begin to distribute more of their titles in digital formats on devices such as Amazon.com's Kindle, Sony's Reader or the upcoming Apple iPad. To combat piracy, publishers have been quietly issuing so-called takedown notices to websites that host or facilitate the sharing of pirated books, requesting the sites to delete or shut down access to the files.

Their suit against RapidShare is among the industry's first concerted efforts to tackle a website and is akin to lawsuits lobbed by music labels against Napster in 1999 and 2000 for copyright violations.

Pirated versions of literary works under copyright were found, according to the court, to be "unlawfully being made publicly available in the context of a share-hosting system on the Internet." The court ordered RapidShare to "promptly block access" to pirated books and "take precautions going beyond this in order to prevent ... further similar infringement."

The publishers sent out a news release proclaiming a significant victory over pirates. Yet lawsuits don't necessarily determine our habits; record companies brought Napster to its knees, but trading MP3s electronically became our cultural norm anyway. Although publishers have every right to defend the works they own, the real trick may be in converting file-sharers to file-buyers.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Pirate flag by Tim Tolle via Flickr

On Monday, ComicConnect announced that it had sold the first Superman comic book, Action Comics No. 1, for a record-setting $1 million. That was the record -- until today, when the first Batman comic sold for $1,075,500. Sock! Bam! Pow!

Both comics marked the first appearance of each superhero, in Action Comics and Detective Comics, respectively. The popularity of both characters meant they each soon earned their own titles.

Although comic books were produced in mass quantities, in the 1930s -- and for a few decades later -- they were considered trash culture. They were read avidly by children who folded them, stuffed them in pockets, crumpled them under the sheets while reading with a flashlight.

The Superman comic, printed in 1938, and the Batman comic, from 1939, were not treated that way. Both were in pristine condition. 

Comic lovers now know to take care of their collections. The market has shot up since the 1960s. According to the Associated Press, the consignor who sold the Batman comic originally bought it for $100.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Images: The Superman cover, left. Credit: Associated Press. Right, the Batman cover. Credit: DC Comics.

Patti Stanger, TV's Millionaire Matchmaker, went two seasons dispensing raw dating advice to wealthy mate-seeking men and the women who hope to love them while single. That has changed, though: Stanger, as her third season began on Bravo, announced her engagement.

Does it make sense to give relationship advice while not in a relationship? Apparently so. Take Lori Gottlieb's buzz-generating book, "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough." In it, she urges women to stop waiting for Mr. Right and instead grab tight hold of Mr. All Right. Gottlieb talked to scientists and psychologists in putting the book together, she told Salon.com:

I'm the messenger. I'm the one who says, look: It seems to me, based on my observations, that women are looking for the wrong things, because the women I know who are super-happy in their marriages put a different emphasis on things than I did and that some of my friends who are still single did. So I went to the experts to find out what is important in long-term love, and are we looking for those things when we're dating? Are we giving those things enough emphasis?

In an interview with KPCC's Larry Mantle on Wednesday, Gottlieb mentioned that her book has elicited offers of dates from men all over. Which seems kind of logical -- write about dating, and then get dates.

Angelenos can ask Gottlieb for her advice in person on Monday. She's appearing at a benefit event for 826LA, moderated by (married) Joel Stein, with Sascha Rothchild, author of "How To Get Divorced By 30," and Greg Behrendt, who wrote "He's Just Not That Into You."

After the panel, there will be an hour of cocktails and a singles mixer. Is there any chance of fireworks when women inspired by Gottlieb's settling bump up against the men who fall into Behrendt's not-that-into-you camp?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by iluvrhinestones via Flickr

At the blog Litkicks, Levi Asher has posted a literary mystery. This aerial photo, he says, is of the site of a significant literary event -- a murder! A fictional murder, anyway, although the place itself is real. The photo was taken in 1924. But where is it, exactly? And what was the book? Well, there's your mystery. 

Here are his hints:

• You have definitely read this novel. It's one of the most widely loved novels of all time.

• A person is killed, during one of the novel's climactic scenes, by the forked road near the top right of the photo.

• The vast expanse in the photo's center, which appears to be a work of geometric modern art, provides one of the novel's central metaphors.

To guess, visit Asher's site -- where he has a larger crop of the image -- and leave a note in the comments. He's going to hold off on posting them so people can get their guesses in unaided. I hope he reveals the answer soon, though -- my guess is waiting.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Dean R. Koontz had been writing for more than 30 years before he decided to do a book signing, and when he finally did, in 2001, he chose to sign at Book Carnival in Orange. Founder Ed Thomas made Book Carnival, which focuses on mystery books, a leader and tastemaker. The store had fans in both writers and readers, and won the Mystery Writers of America's Raven Award for a non-writing contribution to the field.

But the fate of the store is now in question. Thomas, whose wife, Pat, suffers from Alzheimer's, died of lung cancer at age 77 on Tuesday. His family has plans to look for a buyer. The OC Register reports:

Thomas was almost always behind the counter, open book in hand (he read the way other people breathe) surrounded by stacks of the just-finished and the about-to-begin. If you wanted something he'd gladly put down his book to help you, though if he liked it, and thought you might, he'd try to sell that one to you, too....

Pat was the people person, the one who built relationships with publishers and day-to-day customers. Ed Thomas, not always the most outgoing guy, knew books. And writers.

He loved writers.

The OC Register spoke to several writers who will miss Thomas, including Koontz, Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker. Plans are being made for a remembrance for Thomas -- at Book Carnival, of course.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Dean R. Koontz at Book Carnival in 2001. Credit: Al Schaben / LA Times

It's been almost five years since John Banville won the Booker Prize for his novel "The Sea," and in that time he's published two crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Now he's back, as Banville, with "The Infinities," a "dazzling example of [his] mastery, as well as of the formal daring and slyly erudite humor that make his novels among the most rewarding available to readers today." That's our reviewer Tim Rutten, who writes:

[I]t's clear that the ambiguous ground between quantitative certainty and aesthetic assertion preoccupies this writer in a particular way. The formal structure of his new novel is the key to its narrative exposition. Banville evokes and simultaneously subverts the classical unities -- all the action takes place in a single day; there is progress from light into darkness. Indeed, the first and most obvious of the narrative conceits is that the old, Homeric gods are once more alive and the storytelling voice is that of Hermes....

In an interview with the Millions, Banville cautioned that the book's math should not be taken too seriously. "The science is just what we call cod science here. It’s fake. And the book is not really concerned with quantum physics and those things, which is very frightening for all of us. It’s a human comedy." In the interview answering a question about the play "Amphitryon" by Heinrich von Kleist that is touched on in this and other works by Banville, he explains:

I constantly say one of my absolute mottos is from Kafka, where he says the artist is the man who has nothing to say. I have nothing to say. I have no opinions about anything. I don’t care about physical, moral, social issues of the day. I just want to recreate the sense of what life feels like, what it tastes like, what it smells like. That’s what art should do. I feel it should be absolutely gloriously useless.

Read Tim Rutten's complete review of Banville's latest glorious uselessness here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: John Banville with his Booker Prize-winning novel "The Sea" in 2005. Credit: Kieran Doherty / Reuters

Three months after debuting in England, Nintendo's Classic Books pack is coming to America. The set will include 100 classic works of literature, including books by Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Another new Nintendo arrival will be the oversized DSi XL hand-held player. Set to arrive on March 28 and priced at $189.99, the DSi XL has a large 4.2-inch double screen and comes in stylish burgundy and bronze cases. What else is new? It will serve as a game device and an e-reader.

Does that mean Nintendo is going head-to-head against Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iPad, the Sony e-reader and the Barnes & Noble Nook?

"It’s not really about trying to take on the e-book market,” Cammie Dunaway, vice president of sales and marketing for North America, said in an interview. “It’s just one more way to enjoy your device.”

But she says a bit more in the Venturebeat video below. "Who needs a Kindle or an iPhone when you've got this?" the interviewer asks. "I don't think anybody does," Dunaway answers.

Readers using the DSi XL, as Dunaway demonstrates, will turn the device on its end. The two screens will serve as a double-page layout, mimicking the experience of holding an open book.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Mario, left. Credit: Nintendo; Mark Twain. Credit: Library of Congress.