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Stephenie Meyer, author of the best-selling Twilight series, has released her first adult novel, The Host.  There are more than 7.5 million copies of her three Young Adult vampire novels, Twilight , New Moon, and Eclipse, in print.  Meyer said that The Host, about warring beings within the body of a woman,  is a science fiction story for people who don't like science fiction.

"It would just be cool if my existing fans liked it,"  Meyer said. "And I hope to get some new readers who would never go into the YA (Young Adult) shelves."  She did not consciously write The Host for an older audience and did not think of it as an adult book until she had completed it and showed the manuscript to her agent.  "I didn't write it differently, but some of the issues are different. I had the chance to explore a mother-daughter relationship, and that's not really a YA thing."

If you've enjoyed Meyer's YA novels, or haven't yet tried her, please take a look at The Host next time you're at Kazoo Books!

Ever wonder what the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are reading?  A Freedom of Information Act request posted online lists the books, movies, and music in the ISS library.  Not surprisingly, the library tends to be heavy on the science fiction with authors David Weber and Lois McMaster Bujold leading the way.  Classics authors like Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov also made it up there, along with popular fantasy authors Robert Jordan and Piers Anthony.  And hey, even David Sedaris made it up to orbit!  Check out the complete list here - http://www.governmentattic.org/docs/ISS_Media_2008.pdf

The winner of this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction novel first published in Britain in 2007 is Richard K. Morgan's Thirteen (published in the UK as Black Man.)  The announcement was made at a ceremony held in London on the opening night of the Sci-Fi London film festival.  Thirteen will be published in paperback next month.  I haven't read it yet, but am a big fan of Morgan's "Takeshi Kovacs" series. 

Even though I have a 15-year-old son, I don't usually look forward to many young adult books.  Well, Harry Potter, of course, but I have been eagerly waiting for Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which goes on sale today.  It's gotten great reviews, including this one from another of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman:

“A wonderful, important book…I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart thirteen-year-olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be thirteen again right now, and reading it for the first time.”

It features a 17-year-old protagonist, Marcus, aka "w1n5t0n" (the protagonist from Orwell's 1984), who is smart, fast, and wise in the ways of the networked world, but after he and his friends are mistakenly accused of terrorism and his city becomes a police state, Marcus must take down the corrupt government himself. 

I think this is going to be a fun book for both my son and I to read!

Michael Chabon's alternate history, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has won the Best Novel Nebula Award.  Winners of the awards, presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, were announced on Saturday, April 26 in Austin, Texas.  Chabon's genre-bending novel imagines a Jewish homeland established on the Alaska panhandle after World War II.  The paperback edition of The Yiddish Policemen's Union will be available on April 29.

Science Fiction author Michael Bishop's spn Jamie was a German teacher killed in the Virginia Tech massacre one year ago.  A story on the USA Today website explores some of the creative ways families and students have found to carry on their loved ones' legacies.  Bishop has written three short stories based on ideas he found on his son's computer.  One of them, "The Pile," features phrases and expressions he heard his son use.  You can read the story here - http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/winter-2008/fiction-the-pile-by-michael-bishop/

"I just felt like one way to keep him with us was to try to realize some of these stories that he intended to write. At this point, it's all about just maintaining this connection," Bishop says.  Bishop is also working to establish an international peace center at Virginia Tech.

J.K. Rowling is suing Muskegon, Michigan-based RDR Books to stop publication of Steven Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon on the grounds that her copyrights are being violated.  Rowling is a fan of the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site that Vander Ark runs, but  draws the line when it comes to publishing the book and charging $24.95. She also says it fails to include any of the commentary and discussion that enrich the Web site and calls it "nothing more than a rearrangement" of her own material.

Vander Ark, a teacher and school librarian in Byron Center before recently moving to London, said he joined an online discussion group devoted to the Harry Potter books in 1999 before launching his own Web site as a hobby a year later. Since then, neither Rowling nor her publisher had ever complained about anything on it, he said.  Rowling mentioned his Web site on her own, writing, "This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an Internet cafe while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing)."   Today, Rowling testified, "This book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work," and said that that she had stopped work on a new novel because the lawsuit had "decimated my creative work over the last month."  Vander Ark claims that the lexicon "enhances the pleasure of readers of the Potter novels, and deepens their appreciation of Ms. Rowling's achievement."

We just got in a new collection by a favorite author of mine, John Kessel.  The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories was just published by Small Beer Press, a small press science Fiction and fantasy publisher.  Kessel has written novels, but is best known as an award-winning short story author.  The back cover promises that this collection "ranges from science fiction to the uncanny to the surreal while intersecting with Frank L. Baum's Oz and the characters of Flannery O'Connor, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen."  Whether you're already a science fiction fan or want to discover the amazing state of the genre today, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence would be a great choice.    

One of Kazoo Book's favorite authors, Joe Heywood, recently launched a wonderful website, www.josephheywood.com.  Joe is the author of many novels, including the Woods Cop Mystery series, but he also shares his paintings, poetry, photography, and a personal blog, "Joe Roads," on the site.   Joe had a showing of his paintings at the Portage District Library a few months ago.  Though he's a family friend, I didn't know he had painted so much or so well!  My wife, who grew up in the Upper Peninsula,was especially impressed.  Anyone with an interest in the Woods Cop books, in nature and the outdoors, or in conservation, should not miss Joe's paintings.  He also announces his next book, Death Roe, which will be released in October.

Junot Díaz's The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, which last month won the National Book Critics Circle Award, has now won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  A reviewer described the novel's title character Oscar as "a 300-pound-plus 'lovesick ghetto nerd' with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien."  But author and reviewer Matthew Sharpe wrote that readers "might at first be surprised by how many chapters of a book entitled The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are devoted not to its sci fi–and–fantasy-gobbling nerd-hero but to his sister, his mother and his grandfather."  And the book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that leaves troubles and tragedy in its wake.

Just a few weeks after Ann Arbor-based Borders Group, the nation's second-largest bookseller, announced that it "was considering options including the sale of the company," Kazoo Books  revealed that it will buy the chain.  All of the more than 1,100 stores around the world, including over 515 Borders stores in the U.S., 31 stores in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Puerto Rico and 520 Waldenbooks stores will be renamed.  As Kazoo Books original store on Clarendon is referred to as "K1" and the Parkview location is "K2," all of the new stores will be called "K42" or "K999," to keep things simple.  Owner Gloria Tiller admitted that adding more than 30,000 employees to the current eight would be a bit of a change and owner and computer programmer Jim Tiller thought that it was possible that more databases might be needed.   The Tillers concluded by saying, "April Fools!"

The 2008 Book Sense Book of the Year winners were recently announced.  Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns won the adult fiction prize, while Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about eating local food, won the award in the adult nonfiction category. Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret won in the children's literature category and Mo Willems received the children's illustrated honors for Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity.

Both the Hosseini and the Kingsolver books are at the top of our best-selling new books last year and we sold out of our first order of the wonderful Selnick book when it won the National Book Award earlier this year, but now have it back in stock.  Many readers feel that A Thousand Splendid Suns is an even better book that Kite Runner and with both the interest in local foods and buying local and the choice of her novel Animal Dreams for our Reading Together community read, the Kingsolver was probably our most popular non-fiction book of the last year. 

Kazoo Books is your local independent Book Sense store.  Please stop in for your free copies of the monthly Book Sense picks and the great Reading Group and Children's Books picks. 

We're expecting copies of what looks like a very funny book, The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes, on it's release date, April Fool's Day.  McSweeney's publishes a very eclectic and usually very funny magazine and the occasional book.  Their 2006 Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists was hilarious and I'm expecting nothing less from their new joke book.  According to a review, it includes "Winnie-the-Pooh is My Coworker," "Ikea Product or Lord of the Rings Character?" "Jane Eyre Runs for President" and "Letters from Odysseus's College Roommate."  If you're a reader, or especially an English major, with a sense of humor, this is the book for you!

The Hugo Award nominees for best Science Fiction novel have been announced.  They are: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, Brasyl by Ian McDonald, Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer, The Last Colony by John Scalzi, and Halting State by Charles Stross.  Winners will be announced at  Denvention 3, the world science fiction convention, in August.


Store favorite John Scalzi was also nominated in the Fan Writer category for his website, Whatever.   This is Charles Stross' fifth consecutive year being nominated in the Best Novel category.

Armageddon in Retrospect, a new collection of unpublished fiction and nonfiction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. will be on sale on April 1.   Vonnegut is a favorite and one of the best selling authors at our stores and we were saddened when he died last year.  But even though I'm often wary of books published posthumously,  this new collection of stories, essays and letters introduced by his son, Mark, sounds fascinating.  The fiction includes stories about time travel, the impossibility of peace in the world, and a tale in which Dr. Lucifer Mephisto teaches his charges about the nature of good and evil.  In his last speech, Vonnegut suggested how we should behave during the Apocalypse - "We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly.  But we should also stop being so serious.  Jokes help a lot.  And get a dog, if you don't already have one."

Science Fiction Grand Master Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday at the age of 90.  The author of more than a hundred books of both science fiction and science, he is most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick on the film.  His other classics include Childhoods End, The Nine Billion Names of God, and Rendezvous with Rama.  His fiction influenced many scientists, especially in the space program.

Clarke is credited with the idea of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.   He was paid 15 pounds for his theory that launched an industry than can now be measured in billions of dollars.  He also anchored television coverage of  Apollo missions to the moon with Walter Cronkite.

Just a few days before he died, Clarke reviewed the final manuscript of his latest novel, The Last Theorem, co-written with Frederik Pohl, which is to be published later this year.  "The Last Theorem has taken a lot longer than I expected. That could well be my last novel, but then I've said that before," Clarke said last year.

In December 2007, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Clarke posted a YouTube video of reflections and wishes.

British fantasy author Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with a rare early-onset form of Alzheimer's last December, announced this month that he will donate $1 million for research into the disease.  The 59-year-old author of the bestselling Discworld series addressed the Alzheimer's Research Trust annual conference, telling them, "It is a shock to find out that funding for Alzheimer's research is just 3% of that to find cancer cures." 

Pratchett said that he now feels the effects of the disease and has given up driving but that his writing goes on, though he's no longer able to type.  Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said, "Whilst we were deeply saddened to learn of Mr Pratchett's diagnosis, we are delighted that he has chosen to speak out about his experiences with Alzheimer's disease, to raise awareness about its impact and the desperate need for more research.

Chris Tregenza has created a website, www.matchitforpratchett.org, in which you can donate directly or buy a  t-shirt to help match Pratchett's donation.  I encourage anyone who has enjoyed Terry Pratchett's wonderful books to consider helping.

Kazoo Books is forming a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Group.  At our recent Writer's Network meetings, we've had many requests for a writer's group specifically for these genres.  It can be frustrating for a writer to workshop science fiction or fantasy stories with writers not familiar with the genre - "Now when you say he's 'two-faced' does he actually have two faces?  Two heads?".  We are having an introductory meeting on Thursday, March 27 at 6:30pm at our Parkview location.  Anyone interested in joining a monthly Science Fiction or Fantasy short fiction writer's group is welcome!  Please call me at 385-2665 if you have any questions.

There are seven Harry Potter books, but there will be eight movies.  It was announced that the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be split into two movies, which will be filmed concurrently.  The movie's producer said that, "Unlike every other book, you cannot remove elements of this book."  Only the fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is longer than Deathly Hallows.  The first half of the film will be released in November 2010 and the second half in May 2011. 

London's  Guardian newspaper reports that the shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction "suggests a broad definition of the genre. Along with tales of androids and genetic engineers, the six books nominated this year include prize-winning literary fiction, a novel for young adults, and what has been described as 'a postmodern psychological mash-up'."  Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, about a near-future England and The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall, about a man whose memory is being eaten by a psychic shark, were two surprises among the nominees.  Also shortlisted was The H-Bomb Girl, Stephen Baxter's teen novel about a 14-year-old growing up in Liverpool in 1962, who finds herself haunted by the looming threat of nuclear conflict over Cuba.  The remaining nominees are more traditional science fiction - Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel, Matthew de Abuitua's The Red Men, and Richard Morgan's Black Man (published in the U.S. as Thirteen).  The award's administrator, Tom Hunter, said: "The Clarke Award has always been about pushing at the speculative edges of its genre."