Newtonville Books Community Blog

Yikes!

As many as 10,000 retail stores will close nationwide this year, led by clothing stores, electronics and food-and-beverage stores, and department stores, in that order, a study released Tuesday shows. Though bookstores represented only a fraction of the total, their closings are forecast to jump 500 percent from last year, to 400 stores.

A $1 million wine book, weighing 30kg, is set to be released in the Spring of 2010. The Wine Opus  will list the world’s top 100 wineries.

That’s not a typo: $1 million. Because . . . every purchaser of the book will also receive a six-bottle case of wine from every one of the 100 wineries listed.

The book is published by Kraken Opus, which has previously launched extravagant works on fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, Indian cricket ace Sachin Tendulkar and Argentine footballer Diego Maradona.

Only 100 copies of the book will be made – 25 have already been pre-ordered, with a number of copies set aside for auction.

Read the full article here.

Even if you can’t remember a specific Reading Rainbow  episode, chances are, the theme song is still lodged somewhere in your head:

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it’s in a book — Reading Rainbow …

Remember now?

Reading Rainbow  comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children’s show in PBS history — outlasted only by Sesame Street  and Mister Rogers.

The show’s run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights.

Click here for the full article.

Cnn.com posted an excerpt from ZEITOUN by Dave Eggers, the author’s latest book. The nonfiction book about a Syrian-American immigrant and his experiences during Hurricane Katrina has been busy collecting rave reviews.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts — the scion of an American political dynasty who became an iconic liberal legislator — died Tuesday night of complications related to a cancerous brain tumor. The 77-year-old Democratic lawmaker was surrounded by family members at his home in the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.

Kennedy’s malignant brain tumor was diagnosed in May 2008, after a seizure struck him while at home on the Cape. He underwent a lengthy surgery in June 2008. Aided by cancer treatments, he returned to his work in the Senate late in 2008, pushing for an overhaul of the nation’s health care system and promoting legislation giving the FDA regulatory powers over tobacco products.

Click here to read the full article.

Look out for Ted Kennedy’s memoir coming out September 14.

It’s impossible not to be excited about all the great books by big-name authors coming out this autumn. Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol,” the sequel to his mega-bestselling “The Da Vinci Code,” is just the tip of the iceberg. This autumn is promising to be a huge season for book lovers.

New fiction: Richard Powers, Alice Munro, E.L. Doctorow, Diana Gabaldon, Stephen King, John Grisham, Audrey Niffenegger, Jonathan Lethem and Lorrie Moore, Barbara Kingsolver, Ha Jin, Wally Lamb, Orhan Pamuk and Philip Roth.

Others: An unpublished work by Michael Crichton, an unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov and unedited short stories by Raymond Carver. A reissue of Michael Jackson’s memoir “Moonwalk” and a deluxe coffee-table edition about the late singer; short fiction by Kurt Vonnegut; Authorized sequels to A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” and Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“.

For the complete AP article, click here.