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• The 7 Habits of Establishing a Monopoly: We at Powells.com would like to bid a fond farewell to the eBooks of one Mr. Stephen Covey.

  According to the New York Times:

  Stephen R. Covey, one of the most successful business authors of the last two decades, has moved e-book rights for two of his best-selling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster, a division of the CBS Corporation, to a digital publisher that will sell the e-books to Amazon.com for one year.
  (more...)

It's been quiet around here. Too quiet.

Today brings news that Natalie Portman has signed to produce and star in the feature film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's bestselling Jane Austen mash-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

This expanded version of the Austen classic adds a twist on the well-known love story when the outbreak of a deadly virus begins to turn townsfolk into killers. Elizabeth Bennet struggles to balance her blossoming love for Mr. Darcy with her obligation to kick some zombie butt.

The zombies may not even be the scariest thing about the film.

Monsters.

Slathering, brutishly dumb and strong. Carnal serpents of sullied desire. Unrelenting wisps of evil that whip at our greatest fears. Magnificent bastards, all of them.

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell described monsters as "explod[ing] all of your standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct." But why do we need them? Why are we still writing about monsters in our shiny world where mystery has been conquered and exposed? Why didn't we leave them behind?

Originally, in stories like Beowulf, monsters served as an ultimate test for the hero, beasts filled with rage and power. The hero faces his/her fear, and slays the monster through ingenuity or amazing strength. The victorious heroes show themselves to be examples for their communities, transcending their mere mortality to become golden superhumans (unlike Beowulf's forever scarpering warriors, possibly to "Yakety Sax"). In contrast, the monster lays defeated, the threat removed, a wise lesson and example for all. Goodnight.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Reviewed by Alexandra Schwartz
The Nation

"Russian literature has been a kind of religion in this country -- a religion based on the moral position of writers, on their suffering," Ludmilla Petrushevskaya once told Sally Laird, her British translator. "All our greatest writers have been sufferers and saints." It was May 1987, and Immortal Love, Petrushevskaya's first collection of short stories, would be published the following year, just in time for her fiftieth birthday. If suffering really could be considered a legitimate qualification for literary greatness, Petrushevskaya had more than earned her due. A year after she was born in 1938, her father abandoned the family, leaving her in Moscow with her mother, the daughter of an eminent linguistics professor. Stalin's Great Purge was under way, and her mother's relatives, old-time Bolshevik intellectuals involved in the revolution, were summarily rounded up for arrest and execution. Though the surviving family members managed to ...

Countless aspiring writers get clubbed with the old adage "Write what you know," but sometimes the whole point of writing a novel is to find out the answers to questions that lay far beyond your experience. With The Army of the Republic, I wanted to answer some questions I'd had since my first travels in revolution-torn Central and South America twenty-five years ago. Not only the big questions, like Is it justified to kill for a better world?, but the smaller ones, like How on earth do a bunch of students and young professionals acquire the will and the skills to take on the state? So, it was this rather selfish journey of discovery that launched me into The Army of the Republic.

The research was as difficult and fascinating as the book's subject. I accumulated a shelf full of interesting books: how to form a new identity, improvise explosives, surveillance, and body-guarding. I talked to organizers of the 1999 WTO Protests, student activists, 1960s activists, CIA people, and assorted others. I read the biographies and memoirs of now-obscure revolutionary leaders whose exploits had once amazed the readers of newspapers across the globe. Still, I needed to learn more about the gut-level feeling of being inside an insurgency, and for that I needed to talk to people who had been through it.

Oh, hi.

I'm Amy Gray. I like smoking, carbs, and words. I live in the (currently) sleek humidity of Melbourne, Australia. When not lying horizontally on my life partner, the couch, I write. Just recently I wrote a book about vampires. I know. No, really, I know. Right now your eyebrows are raised, your hand clenched on the mouse or touchpad ready to click away in indignation. It's true: I have contributed to the glut of vampire books on the market.

But I am unrepentant.

Some eleven and a half months ago, I celebrated Christmas with a self-hosted, 40-hour vampire film festival. It started with the sublime Nosferatu and ended, somewhat inexplicably, with the first installment of Twilight.

At the time, my housemate and I nearly came to blows over the film. I was apoplectic over the characters, enraged by the original novel and smug about the slathering fans.

Invisible by Paul Auster

Reviewed by Vincent Rossmeier
Rain Taxi

Behind any artist's urge to create is an egotistical impulse -- a desire to be remembered, to see one's works immortalized. Writers attempt to defy death by achieving eternal life on the page and in the imaginations of readers. Such hopes are ultimately illusory: obviously, a page or a book or a computer file may outlast their creators, but nothing has the stamina to outlast time. Yet few writers are either willing or courageous enough to confront the fact that literary immortality is essentially impossible.

Paul Auster is an exception. In works like The New York Trilogy, In the Country of Last Things, and perhaps most especially, The Book of Illusions, Auster has proven himself to be the English language's foremost explorer of artistic oblivion. Texts disappear, architecture crumbles, films are burned before anyone can view them. One might extrapolate that Auster writes less to be remembered by posterity than to remind us of the beautiful impermanence of life. And while he uses some of the meta-textual, ...

Describe your latest project.
Norton has just published The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, a novel that took seven years of my life to complete as I got inside the skin of Fidel. Perhaps it will take more than that to leave him, because — believe me! — it feels good inside there. The journey started when I decided to write about myself, including my history of leaving Cuba. At that time, I found that I could not write about it without writing about Fidel, and I found that I could not write about Fidel without writing in his voice, and that is how this book came about. The newest project? I'm writing a novel about Africa. It is about a war on the North American continent that, as always, is decided by foreigners. In this case, the Cubans. The Cubans as foreigners.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Who Killed Norberto Fuentes?: Just a History.

Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying.

Ernest Hemingway: Islands in the Stream.

Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers by Ambrose Bierce

Reviewed by Elizabeth Bachner
Bookslut

With Ambrose Bierce, it's like you're either against him or you're against him. Even if you love his long-curdled, tireless bitchiness -- even if it validates you and vindicates you and just plain makes you feel better -- you know that if he met you at a party or read your short story in Harper's or The New Yorker, he would shrivel you and skewer you and make you sorry you'd ever tried to share his space on the planet. Meanwhile, Bierce's own life seems to have been a bitter, strife-filled stew of self-fulfilling prophecy. His 1909 usage guide, Write It Right, shows that he had an unsurprising loathing for slang, vernacular, changes in the English language, and creative grammar. The surprising part is that, even in 1909, most of the violations that got Bierce's panties all up in a twist ...

I have recently written a novel about life in England during the Second World War. I felt some concern before I tackled this theme — the War ended a long time ago and books written about the comparatively recent past sometimes have a somewhat contrived feel to them. I do not know why this should be so; perhaps one explanation is that the author knows, but does not quite know, what it felt like to be alive during that time. But whatever the reason may be, I was wary.

Yet, there were reasons why I really wanted to write La's Orchestra Saves the World. One was to do with two groups of people — the British and the Poles — and the other was to do with a particular place — Suffolk, one of eastern England's most beautiful counties, a place of wide skies, of hedgerow-delineated fields, or meandering lanes. In relation to people, I wanted to talk about what it was like for very ordinary people caught up in a great historical conflict. Not everyone in such circumstances plays a front-line part; most people simply carry on with their day-to-day lives, but may do so in conditions of privation and, if one lies beneath the bombers' paths, in some degree of fear. I wanted to write about an ordinary woman who ended up doing her war work on the land — helping a farmer with his chickens. But she also set up a small amateur orchestra for British and American airmen at the neighbouring base, and this orchestra helped people in dark times.

The other group of people I wanted to say something about were the Poles. I had become increasingly interested in what the Second World War was like for those Poles who managed to get out of their country and fight from outside it. Many of these ended up in Britain, having reached these shores by a very circuitous route. The Polish Air Force, for example, went to Romania and then on to France before they eventually reached Britain. From bases in southern England, they joined in the aerial battle, and played an important part in all stages of the conflict, including the Battle of Britain.