In the event that she gets tired of merely telling us new things about her old Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling hasn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of actually writing a new one. From Time (”Person of the Year 2007: Runners-Up: J. K. Rowling,” by Nancy Gibbs):

“There have been times since finishing, weak moments,” she says, “when I’ve said, ‘Yeah, all right,’ to the eighth novel.” But she’s convinced she’s doing the right thing to take some time away, do something else. She’s working on two projects now, an adult novel and a “political fairy tale.” “If, and it’s a big if, I ever write an eighth book about the [wizarding ] world, I doubt that Harry would be the central character,” she says. “I feel like I’ve already told his story. But these are big ifs. Let’s give it 10 years and see how we feel then.”

There’s a lot more, including talk about her “religious agenda”–but even though she’s taken some shots from fervent fundamentalists, she’s no Philip Pullman.

Before there was Radiohead, there was Jeff Kinney (”Crossover Dreams: Turning Free Web Work Into Real Book Sales,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times):

That a book derived from free online content has sold so well may allay some fears that giving something away means nobody will want to pay for it. It also encourages publishers who increasingly scour the Internet for talent, hoping to capitalize on the audiences that a popular Web site can deliver.

"I think books are still things, thank goodness, that people want to own," said Michael Jacobs, chief executive of Abrams. "The package of the book and the way it feels is something apart and separate from being able to read it online."

Don’t look at me–I’m ripping my library so I can play my books on a Kindle. Not sure I have the right kind of headphones, though. 

(Read the Booklist review of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.)

So, if you’re curious about where that handwritten J. K. Rowling book ended up, now the truth can be told: it’s on Amazon. Naturally.

Given a recent Major Motion Picture Event, Philip Pullman’s popular His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, 1996; The Subtle Knife, 1997; The Amber Spyglass, 2000) has enjoyed a resurgence of attention. Well, perhaps “enjoyed” doesn’t tell the full story. But rather than link to the many examples of fear for thought, I’ll just link to this interesting interview in Intelligent Life (”An Interview with Philip Pullman,” by Robert Butler). Pullman addresses his critics…

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. “They’ll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It’s very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”

How will he respond to those attacks? “A soft answer turneth away wrath, as it says in my favourite book.” (Proverbs 15:1.) So he won’t argue back? “It’s a foolish thing for the teller of a story to answer critics. If you’re putting forward an argument, you can argue back and demonstrate why your argument is better than theirs. But if someone doesn’t like a story you’ve written, what are you going to say? ‘Well, you should’?”

…and trash-talks some children’s classics:

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia”. Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. “I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn’t touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don’t like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with.”

Pullman’s work, of course, addresses some of the great unanswered questions of existence. However, after reading the interview, I have a new unanswered question: what, exactly, is “whiffy cheese”?

In an extremely brief item in the Scotsman (”JK split fuelled Potter’s anger“), well, it’s too brief to summarize without a quote becoming redundant:

HARRY Potter author JK Rowling has revealed the boy wizard’s anger stems from the break-up of her first marriage.

She said her split from Jorge Arantes in 1993 was a dark period, adding: “A part of Harry’s anger is my own.”

I sure hope she starts writing another bestselling seven-book series soon, so we can go back to hearing about the stories on the pages. I have a feeling that next we’re going to learn that Rowling’s decision to write about a wizard came from her fondness for Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic.”

(Via Sneed.)

And the children’s-book revelations about sexual orientation just keep on coming. From America’s Finest News Source, The Onion (”R.L. Stine Reveals Slappy From Night Of The Living Dummy Was Gay“):

NEW YORK - Children’s author R.L. Stine broke his long-held media silence Monday to announce that Slappy, the evil ventriloquist’s dummy from the Goosebumps Night Of The Living Dummy trilogy, was a homosexual.

“This is not completely unexpected,” said Goosebumps fan Ned Kosorowski, who has long speculated that the fictional wooden doll preferred the company of men, and has even written fan fiction describing graphic sexual encounters between Slappy and Amy’s father. “Slappy’s constant attempts to break out of the closet that Amy stores him in at night clearly represent his struggle with homosexuality - as well as his deep-seated, repressed feelings for [rival ventriloquist’s dummy] Mr. Wood.”

What? You thought that the end of the Harry Potter series meant that we could finally stop talking about Harry Potter? Ha!

J. K. Rowling’s recent outing of Albus Dumbledore has puffed a smoldering fire back into flame. Are her ex-post-facto revelations a carefully calculated attempt to prolong the publicity–or proof positive of full-blown logorrhea? (Actually, I’d like to coin the word “authorrhea.”)

Bring on the media overkill!

On Salon (”Dumbledore? Gay. J. K. Rowling? Chatty.“), Rebecca Traister wishes Rowling would shut up, already.

Thanks to Rowling’s loose lips, the Potter universe continues to make news even after its end. In her desire to control and describe it, she’s turning a modern assumption about what authorship means inside out. Whoever said the author was dead sure hadn’t meant Joanne Rowling.

Some Guy with a Website (”Rowling’s Wide Stance“) says, graphically, that fuming fans should get over it.

Author J.K. Rowling takes the initiative in declaring the sexual orientation of one of her beloved characters. This has shocked the fan fiction community, who for so long have assumed it was their right to make their own baseless and unfounded assumptions about fictional characters they had no part in creating.

Radar, getting in the spirit of things, outs some more childhood icons (”Fairy Tales,” by Neel Shah and Paige Ferrari):

Jo March, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
A tomboy with a rather unladylike roughness to her character, Jo secured her place in the pantheon of closet cases after rejecting a marriage proposal from ardent young buck Laurie. She also cut off her long hair - her “one beauty” according to the novel - in favor of the DeGeneres bob.

And, of course, you can already buy the T-shirt.

Perhaps you’ve heard about this already, but if you haven’t, I think you’ll be interested. I saw this in Publishers Weekly (”Live from Frankfurt,” by Karen Holt) first, but New York (”Dave Eggers’s Next Novel Is Based on ‘Where the Wild Things Are’?“) included pretty pictures:

Publishers Weekly reports that the Frankfurt Book Fair is abuzz with talk about Dave Eggers’s new novel, which apparently quietly sold to Ecco last winter. Ecco, the small, super-literary imprint at Harper, doesn’t usually brag about sales potential, usually because most of its books don’t have a lot of sales potential. According to PW, though, Ecco chief Dan Halpern is telling everyone at the fair that the book - an adult novel based on Where the Wild Things Are, scheduled to be published in 2008 to coincide with Spike Jonze’s movie, for which Eggers co-wrote the screenplay - will be a monster hit, if you’ll pardon the expression.

I can see why they think it has sales potential. I can also imagine a marketing meeting where someone riffs that the book will appeal to kids and adults, or the kid in everyone, or adults because they used to be kids, or kids through adults and everyone in between….

It probably won’t sell well to the anti-monster crowd, but what do those people like?

So now Little, Brown won’t be publishing Tintin in the Congo at all (”Little, Brown Cancels Tintin in the Congo,” by Lynn Andriani, Publishers Weekly):

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which had been planning to publish Tintin in the Congo, a book criticized for its racist, Colonial-era depictions of Africans, has quietly pulled the title from its fall list, PW has learned. The publisher also said it will not include the book in a forthcoming box set of all 24 books in the Tintin series. 

Well, nobody said you have to publish something you don’t like–or that your customers don’t want. But pulling the book from what would have been a definitive boxed set has me wondering: did Thomas Bowdler ever stay the night in a Potemkin Village?

What I mean to say is that, if some kid gets hooked on Tintin now and grows up to tell his friends that he’s a fan of Hergé, he won’t really have seen the whole picture, will he?

Sometimes you see the same thing on several different blogs, and how you cite it simply depends on the order in which you read the blogs. (Making the case that you should name your blog “AAA Litblog”.) Anyway, via BookDaddy via Bookslut, it’s Beckett for Babies:

Brilliant. I hope somebody publishes this.