Category: Books

Lawyer wants Simpson book off eBay
LOS ANGELES – An attorney representing the family of Nicole Brown Simpson accused eBay on Thursday of not moving quickly enough to yank auctions of “If I Did It,” O.J. Simpson’s hypothetical story of how he would have killed his ex-wife.
The book had been scheduled for release Nov. 30 following a two-part Simpson interview on Fox, but News Corp., owner of Fox Broadcasting and publisher HarperCollins, canceled the project after an outcry condemning it as revolting and exploitive.
Responding to concerns from HarperCollins, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said Thursday that the online auction house has been removing offers to sell purported copies of the book from the site. In one case, bids had topped $1 million.
“Once HarperCollins reports to us, we take the auctions down,” Durzy said. “We appreciate the concern of the Brown family, but this is a procedure that has to be followed.”
Brown family attorney Natasha Roit said the site’s deadline-style auctions means some transactions could finish before eBay acts. HarperCollins has said all copies of the book would be destroyed, but there is always a chance some could get out.
“The voice of the American public was heard loud and clear by News Corp. and HarperCollins in recalling the books,” Roit said. “We really need to stem the tide and get these books out of circulation because anything that’s out there now is really hurtful to the family.”
Simpson, 59, was acquitted of the double murder of his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman in 1995 but was later found liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Goldman’s family. The former football star has not paid the $33.5 million civil judgment, and his NFL pension and Florida home cannot be seized.
In interviews with The Associated Press, Simpson denied committing the murders. He also disputed his publisher’s contention that the book amounts to a confession, insisted the title was not his idea, and said the hypothetical sections were written by a ghostwriter.
News Corp. spokesman Andrew Butcher said the company paid $880,000 to a third party in connection with the project. Of that amount, $100,000 was to go to the ghostwriter and the rest to Simpson’s children.
“Absolutely no money was ever given to O.J. Simpson by us,” Butcher said Wednesday.
Simpson said any profit from the book would be “blood money,” but he said he needed to pay his bills.
“It’s all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,” Simpson said, referring to authors of books about him. “It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead.”
Simpson would not say how much he was paid in advance, but he said it was less than the $3.5 million that has been reported. He said the money already has been spent, some of it on tax obligations.
Butcher said News Corp. cannot recoup any of the money because Simpson honored his end of the contract by producing the book.
Simpson said he was convinced the book would have been a best-seller.
“If I Did It” cracked the top 20 of Amazon.com last weekend in prepublication sales, but by Monday, when it was canceled, the book had fallen to No. 51.

O.J. Simpson book, TV special canceled
NEW YORK – After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and TV special “If I Did It.”
“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. “We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”
A dozen Fox affiliates had already said they would not air the two-part sweeps month special, planned for next week before the Nov. 30 publication of the book by ReganBooks. The publishing house is a HarperCollins imprint owned ó like the Fox network ó by News Corp.
In both the book and show, Simpson speaks in hypothetical terms about how he would have committed the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Goldman.
Relatives of the victims have lashed out at the now scuttled publication and broadcast plans.
“He destroyed my son and took from my family Ron’s future and life. And for that I’ll hate him always and find him despicable,” Fred Goldman told ABC last week.
The industry trade publication Broadcasting & Cable editorialized against the show Monday, saying “Fox should cancel this evil sweeps stunt.”
One of the nation’s largest superstore chains, Borders Group Inc., said last week it would donate any profits on the book to charity.
Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of murder in a case that became its own TV drama. The former football star and announcer was later found liable for the deaths in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Goldman family.
Judith Regan, publisher of “If I Did It,” said she considered the book to be Simpson’s confession.
The television special was to air on two of the final three nights of the November sweeps, when ratings are watched closely to set local advertising rates. It has been a particularly tough fall for Fox, which has seen none of its new shows catch on and is waiting for the January bows of “American Idol” and “24.”
The closest precedent for such an about-face came when CBS yanked a miniseries about Ronald Reagan from its schedule in 2003 when complaints were raised about its accuracy. The Reagan series was seen on its sister premium-cable channel, Showtime, instead.
One station manager who had said he wasn’t airing the special said he was concerned that whether or not Simpson was guilty, he’d still be profiting from murders.
“I have my own moral compass and this was easy,” said Bill Lamb, general manager of WDRB in Louisville.
For the publishing industry, the cancellation of “If I Did It” was an astonishing end to a story like no other. Numerous books have been withdrawn over the years because of possible plagiarism, most recently Kaavya Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” but a book’s removal simply for objectionable content is virtually unheard of.
Sales had been strong, but not sensational. “If I Did It” cracked the top 20 of Amazon.com last weekend, but by Monday afternoon, at the time its cancellation had been announced, the book had fallen to No. 51.

Canadian retailers divided over O.J. Simpson book
The controversial release of O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional book about the killing of his ex-wife and her friend has divided book retailers in Canada, some of whom plan not to stock it.
If I Did It, in which Simpson speculates on how, hypothetically, he could have killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, has been at the centre of controversy since its release was announced earlier this week.
While Canadian retail giant Chapters Indigo has indicated it plans to stock the book, other smaller chains say they plan to avoid it. The book is scheduled for release Nov. 30.
Nicholas Hoare, who runs retail chain Nicholas Hoare Books, told CBC Radio the book has no place in his stores.
“I don’t think our customers want to be turned off. I think they want to be turned on,” he said. “If you really want the details of O.J. Simpson, you just have to stand in the check-out line of a supermarket and you can see the whole thing plastered in front of the National Enquirer.
“This is not our bag at all,” he said.
Toronto-based retailer Book City is also not planning to stock the book, according to the Toronto Star.
A spokeswoman for McNally Robinson, which owns retail chains in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Calgary, told CBC Arts Online the owners are still discussing the decision whether to stock the book.
Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of murdering Brown Simpson and Goldman in a widely viewed and controversial case. He was later found liable in a wrongful-death suit filed by the Goldman family but has failed to pay the $33.5 million judgment.
HarperCollins Canada had reportedly been offering the book to retailers without revealing the author, subject or title. This practice tipped Hoare off as to what kind of content to expect, he said.
“That puts the hackles up immediately in the sense that one takes to the hills instinctively,” he said. The last time a publisher tried this technique it was for a tell-all book about Diana, Princess of Wales, from her former boyfriend, he said.
Hoare said while his bookstores won’t be stocking If I Did It, it would be available if customers asked to have it ordered. He also admitted the book will likely “sell like a rocket.”
Earlier this week, Fox News announced the former football player would be appearing on the network to do a two-part interview in conjunction with the release of the book, to be published by HarperCollins imprint ReganBooks.
‘It was personal’
Under a storm of criticism, ReganBooks publisher Judith Regan said in a release issued Friday she chose to go ahead with the book because she was a victim of domestic violence and thought proceeds of the sale would go to Simpson’s kids.
“I didn’t know what to expect when I got the call that the killer wanted to confess,” Regan said in an eight-page statement titled “Why I Did It.”
“But I knew one thing. I wanted the confession for my own selfish reasons and for the symbolism of that act. For me, it was personal.”
She said she was in an abusive relationship in her 20s and saw Simpson’s confessional as a way to get closure. “I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives,” she said.
Though Simpson does not actually admit to the killings, Regan said she considers the book a confession.
ReganBooks has published other controversial books like former baseball player Jose Canseco’s steroid-confessional Juiced and Jenna Jameson’s How To Make Love Like A Porn Star.

New documentary shows another side of Orson Welles
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Apparently we are entering a season of Orson Welles discoveries. Two major biographies have hit bookstores, Joseph McBride’s “What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?” and Simon Callow’s second volume of his three-book work on Welles.
At AFI Fest in Los Angeles, Peter Bogdanovich is reprising his Sacred Monsters monologue about his legendary Hollywood friends including Welles. Also at AFI is the world premiere of “Searching for Orson,” a documentary by Croatian filmmakers Jakov and Dominik Sedlar.
The Croatian connection is no surprise to Welles scholars and admirers who know that Welles spent his declining years — despite being married to another woman — with a beautiful, exotic and much younger Croatian actress-sculptress-writer, Oja Kodar, who helped write many of his scripts and appeared in his films.
Naturally, Kodar gave her fellow countrymen access to her Welles film archives and herself for an interview. The Sedlars return the favor by never mentioning Welles’ wife or the battles Kodar has had with one of Welles’ surviving daughters over the ownership of his most legendary unfinished film, “The Other Side of the Wind.”
“Orson” devotes much of its running time to this love affair, ignoring nearly all of Welles’ early life and career. By default then, this is a film about Welles’ late life and the saga of “Other Side.” In an interview, Bogdanovich insists that “Other Side” is the one film of Welles’ many unfinished projects that could be completed without the master and indeed that Welles once asked him to do so after his death. (Bogdanovich plays dual roles in this film as its narrator and an interviewer, which confuses the issue of the film’s point of view.)
At the first screening Thursday night, Dominik Sedlar claimed that Showtime is poised to sign documents to fund completion of the film by Bogdanovich but was vague about the ownership of the footage. But hope springs eternal. “Orson” contains much tantalizing footage from “Other Side,” originally shot about 36 years ago, but it appears in a disjointed manner, making any critical judgment impossible.
The film’s other “revelation” is that Welles had a grandson he never knew existed. Daughter Rebecca Welles Manning, who died in 2004, apparently had an illegitimate son, Marc, she gave up for adoption. This fact actually does appear in McBride’s book but isn’t given as much weight as it is in this film. Marc appears onscreen, his face unmistakably reminiscent of his grandfather’s. Tragically, a car crash has impaired his mental facilities.
Of the talking heads, Steven Spielberg offers the most cogent and articulate assessment of Welles’ greatness and his influence on current image-makers. Paul Mazursky and cameraman Gary Graver, among others, supply amusing anecdotes but never fully put their finger on what made him great.
The film mentions things like Welles’ belief that he was Jewish despite all evidence to the contrary but never follows up. Nor does it get to the heart of why so many projects were left unrealized. Nevertheless, “Orson” is often fascinating. Nothing about Welles was ordinary, and this film does capture the love and admiration so many people still maintain for this Renaissance man, who was so adept in radio, stage, film, art and the art of living.

Lemony Snicket’s end draws near — or does it?
NEW YORK, Oct 10 (Reuters Life!) – Lemony Snicket, the narrator and biographer of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” is facing his demise with the 13th and final book in the gothic children’s series out this week — or is he?
Author Daniel Handler, the creator of Lemony Snicket, says “The End” will reveal the fate of the three Baudelaire orphans and evil Count Olaf when it goes on sale on the suitably unlucky Friday, October 13 with two characters facing death.
But San Francisco-based Handler, 36, who began the series in 1999, told Reuters that the dour Lemony Snicket, who is rich with sarcasm and irony, will survive:
Q: Is this the end of Lemony Snicket?
A: “I don’t think so. It is the last book in the series but he will live on. Lemony Snicket, I am sure, will reappear, assuming nothing dreadful happens to him in the interim.
“This spring, a piece that Lemony Snicket wrote in conjunction with a composer (Nathaniel Stookey) was performed by the San Francisco Symphony. There’s a picture book from that coming out. Lemony Snicket and I, we get on famously. It is almost as if we are the same person.”
Q: Are you sad or relieved that this is the last book?
A: “I am mostly in a state of disbelief and shock. The question really is how in the world did I manage to write 13 books about dreadful things happening to three helpless orphans. I always set out to write 13 books. To me the only thing that seemed more interesting that one book about dreadful things was 13 volumes on the same theme.”
Q: Did the success of the series that has sold over 50 million copies surprise you?
A: “Surprise does not begin to cover it. I never thought very many people would be interested in this at all. I know of no one who was unsurprised. My wife liked the book and people had nothing but best wishes for me but no one at all predicted the attention it has received.”
Q: You weren’t a children’s writer, having written two adult novels before. Why the move into children’s literature and why do you think Lemony Snicket appeals to them?
A: “I am just someone who thinks of terrible things and I didn’t think I would make a career in children’s literature. It was only because this gothic idea kept coming back to me (that I wrote this series).
“I think (children) like the fact that good behavior is not necessarily rewarded and bad behavior is not necessarily punished. This reflects a reality that face in everyday life. They like thinking of people in pathetic and stressful situations.”
Q: Have parents also liked the series?
A: “Most parents have enjoyed it. Every so often there are a few grumbles. In Texas there was a challenge (in a school) to the books because they said they promoted negative thoughts. Mind you I don’t mind admitting that every now and then I have the odd negative thought about Texas.”
Q: The first three books were made into the film “Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Can we expect more?
A: “They are talking of it.”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: “I am working on a new novel for adults about pirates…set in the present day. I will write it next year so it should be out in a couple of years.
“I like writing. When I finish a book I may take a day to clear some nonsense off my desk and maybe another to go to a movie in the afternoon or drink cocktails with a friend but after that I really want to get back to writing.
“I have a child (a son) now so I tend to start work a bit later in the day but most days I will write from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m..”
Q: What are you reading at the moment?
A: “I am reading a bunch of gothic novels. It is as if I want to get them all out of my system. I am reading Wilkie Collins’ ‘Armadale.”‘

Rupert Everett spills beans on Hollywood
LONDON – Rupert Everett hates Hollywood. The British actor, whose screen hits include “Another Country,” “Shrek” and “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” says he’s sick of the movie industry’s hypocrisy and homophobia. He’s even tired of celebrity ó the whole glittering illusion deliciously evoked and eviscerated in his candid new autobiography “Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins.”
“Hollywood is a mirage,” said Everett, 47, reclining in jeans and plaid shirt on the sofa of a London hotel suite.
Movie stars are “blobs who don’t say anything, aren’t allowed to say anything. They are paid to shut up.”
Fortunately, Everett can’t help talking.
The book, for which he reportedly received a seven-figure advance, is a string of glittering anecdotes with edge, bonbons with a bitter center.
Everett is a waspish observer of the celebrity A-list, from Madonna (“she oozed sex appeal”) to Julia Roberts (“beautiful and tinged with madness”) to Sharon Stone (“utterly unhinged”).
The book is a sort of Rough Guide to late 20th-century highlife ó and lowlife ó that moves from London to Paris, New York, St. Tropez, L.A.’s Laurel Canyon and Miami’s South Beach. There are walk-on parts for Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Welles, Bob Dylan, Donatella Versace and a host of other luminaries. Everett seems to know everyone, remember all and recount everything.
Almost everything. Everett skates quickly over his brief stint as a London rent boy, although he cheerfully admits that he stalked the actor Ian McKellen.
The openly gay actor also discloses his handful of heterosexual affairs ó with Paula Yates, wife of Bob Geldof, French actress Beatrice Dalle and Hollywood star Susan Sarandon.
The book is a feast for gossip fans, and Everett is an articulate and charming raconteur with a knack for a memorable image. At one point, a swimming pool is described as “shaped like a Xanax.”
“I think what people will be really surprised about is the writing,” said Antonia Hodgson, Everett’s editor at British publisher Little, Brown. “It’s not just another celebrity book.
“He’s not so much interested in spilling the beans about a particular celebrity, but about showing what celebrity does to those people.”
Everett says he was inspired by “The Moon’s A Balloon,” David Niven’s literate, witty memoir of Hollywood’s golden age.
“I also loved the prewar frenzy of Evelyn Waugh, that feeling of the end of the world coming,” said Everett. “It seems to me that, especially through show business, everything is getting more and more feverish and faster and nastier and scarier.
“Entertainment is becoming the great decoy ó we are so entertained, it’s almost impossible for us to think about anything else. The only thing that has continuity in the news is Jennifer Lopez’s bottom.”
The book is also the story of Everett’s lifelong flight from the conformity of an upper-class English upbringing that saw him sent away to a Catholic boarding school at the age of 7.
He recounts his early career as a youthful rebel and party animal, friend of prostitutes, addicts, divas and thieves. He says he has always been drawn to “the freaks, the overdoses and the suicides.”
He says being gay “certainly wasn’t acceptable in any of the arenas that were on offer to me. So I think I had an instinct to escape into a world that I thought would be more friendly.”
Everett was disappointed to find showbiz “as middle-class and provincial” as the private school world he’d left behind.
“My imagination of show business was this red plush netherworld of drunks and sex maniacs and killers and freaks,” he said. “It’s not. My world is, because I’ve doggedly tried to create that world. But it’s not in general.”
Everett has often complained of Hollywood’s homophobia, arguing his sexuality has stopped him getting the leading-man roles offered to his countryman Hugh Grant.
But he’s also highly self-critical. Everett emerges from the book as ruthless and driven, a bit of a monster who confesses he “lied about everything. My age. My name. My background.”
“I think the actor’s geography, there’s a hole in it somewhere,” he said. “There’s a hole in your identity, a black hole that you try and fill up with posturing.”
For all his drive to be a star, Everett is ambivalent about success. The book recounts his highs ó his breakthrough as an English schoolboy turned Soviet spy in “Another Country,” his Hollywood triumph as Julia Roberts’ gay pal “My Best Friend’s Wedding” ó and the many lows. These include the disastrous rock’n’roll saga “Hearts of Fire” and “The Next Best Thing,” a limp comedy-drama co-starring Madonna.
At the height of his fame, after “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” he is recognized on the street as “the gay guy from that movie.”
He yearns to be taken seriously as an actor, laments the superficiality of Hollywood, yet has reportedly resorted to Botox injections to maintain his lean, unlined good looks. It’s working. The sculpted cheekbones are intact, the big, dark eyes as luminous as ever.
These days, he travels the world on behalf of the Global Fund against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and declares showbiz “not very relevant.”
“To be honest, for me it’s not the time for show business,” he said ó although he’s got a play, a movie and “a couple of TV things” in the works.
“Life behind a velvet rope ó I never enjoyed it. I like going out, going to bars, going to clubs, hanging out on the street.
“I always thought an actor should be like a bodybuilder. His life should be like a muscle ó it should be exercised and flexed and worked. Doing everything, experiencing as much as you can.
“It was a conscious decision for me to exist like the people I really admired on-screen ó the Marlon Brandos, the Montgomery Clifts, the James Deans.
“You felt they had experienced everything. Their eyes were shocked and dead and alive and glowing like coals at the same time. And I think that was through experience, using your life as a tool. That’s the way I wanted to conduct myself.”

‘U2byU2’: A portrait by the artists
Arguably the greatest rock band on the planet, U2 now offers the definitive version of how it got there.
U2byU2 (HarperCollins, $39.95) has 1,500-plus images and a rich band autobiography culled from 150 hours of interviews with singer Bono, guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and manager Paul McGuinness.
“We felt it was important to get the story on record, but that’s not to say we’re not going to go on a good many more years,” he says. “This is the story thus far.”
In this exclusive excerpt, the band has decamped to Berlin to record Achtung Baby. They arrive Oct. 3, 1990, the official day of Germany’s reunification, but soon realize their vision and brotherhood is anything but unified.
Edge: We went to Berlin with a lot of ideas but most of them were very skeletal and undeveloped. They were directions and hints that we hoped would become fully-fledged songs when we kicked them around in rehearsal but unfortunately, since a lot of them started out from unusual origins, sometimes drum machines, sometimes just strange sounds, they didn’t sound very good when the band tried to play them. There was an awkward phase where things weren’t working out and there were two ways to analyze it. Adam and Larry were convinced the song ideas were crap and Bono and I thought the fault lay with the band.
Larry: I thought this might be the end. We had been through tough circumstances before and found our way out, but it was always outside influences that we were fighting against. For the first time ever it felt like the cracks were within. And that was a much more difficult situation to negotiate.
Bono: What we thought were just hairline cracks that could be easily fixed turned out to be more serious, the walls needed underpinning, we had to put down new foundations or the house would fall down. In fact it was falling down all around us. We were running up hotel bills and we had professional people, the U2 crew, staring at our averageness and scratching their heads and wondering if maybe they’d have been better off working for Bruce Springsteen. We came face to face with our limitations as a group on a lot of levels, playing and songwriting. When you’re at sea the smartest thing to do is to find some dry land as quick as possible. So I think Larry and Adam were just anxious: “Stop messing around with all this electronica, let’s get back to doing what we do. Because all this experimental stuff isn’t working very well, is it? And, by the way, Clockwork Orange was (expletive).” There was a bit of that going on. “Did somebody say we were a rock band?” As you were walking down the corridor, you’d overhear that kind of remark.
Larry: In the past, when we were writing music, we would be in a room playing and the discussion was always along the lines of: “I don’t like that particular part, try something else.” There seemed to be consensus. We were starting on a blank page to a large degree, perhaps with just a guitar or melody or a riff or a vocal idea. So we started at the same place and ended at the same place. This time around, it wasn’t a blank page. The parameters were already set, by drum machines, loops and synth pads. And it’s kind of hard to embrace new rules when you don’t understand them.
Adam: We weren’t getting anywhere until One fell into our laps and suddenly we hit a groove.
Bono: Maybe “great” is what happens when “very good” gets tired. We kind of out-stared the average, it blinked first and One arrived.
Edge: I was trying to take one of our half finished ideas and give it some inspiration. I went off into another room and developed a couple of different chord progressions, neither of which actually worked where they were supposed to. (Producer) Danny Lanois said, “What happens if you play both of them, one into the next?” I was playing acoustic guitar and Bono got on the microphone and started improvising melodies and within a few minutes we had the bones of the song, melodically, structurally and even lyrically.
Bono: The words just fell out of the sky, a gift. We had a request from the Dalai Lama to participate in a festival called Oneness. I love and respect the Dalai Lama but there was something a little bit “let’s hold hands” hippie to me about this particular event. I am in awe of the Tibetan position on non-violence but this event didn’t strike a chord. I sent him back a note saying, “One ó but not the same.”
Edge: At the instant we were recording it, I got a very strong sense of its power. We were all playing together in the big recording room, a huge, eerie ballroom full of ghosts of the war, and everything fell into place. It was a reassuring moment, when everyone finally went, “Oh, great, this album has started.” It’s the reason you’re in a band ó when the spirit descends upon you and you create something truly affecting. One is an incredibly moving piece. It hits straight into the heart.
Larry: It was similar to the way we had recorded in the past. In some ways it was a sign that the blank page approach was still valid. Everything was not broken.

Hannibal Lecter returns for holiday season
TORONTO (Reuters) – Call it “Hannibal Lecter, the early years.” After a silence of seven years, author Thomas Harris has written a new book featuring fictional serial killer/cannibal Hannibal Lecter, famously played in films by Anthony Hopkins.
The book, “Hannibal Rising,” will be in stores on December 5 with a first printing of 1.5 million copies and just in time for the Christmas sales season, Delacorte Press, an imprint of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, said on Tuesday.
The 356-page novel, a last-minute addition to Delacorte’s list of new books for the holiday season, is the fourth book dealing with the cannibalistic doctor and chronicles his early years, Bantam publisher Irwyn Applebaum said.
Applebaum said the book was an eagerly awaited part of the story but had taken seven years since the last novel in the series, “Hannibal,” as Harris, a native of Mississippi, does not write at a “prolific pace” for a popular novelist.
“This villain has fascinated readers. It’s very unusual for a character to stay alive that long in the imagination of readers,” Applebaum told Reuters.
Lecter first appeared in print in Harris’ 1981 book “Red Dragon” and then in 1988 in “Silence of the Lambs.”
But he became widely known through the 1991 Oscar-winning movie “Silence of the Lambs,” starring Hopkins and Jodie Foster as FBI trainee-turned-agent Clarice Starling.
The film ends with Lecter, who enjoys a glass of Chianti as he devours human liver, saying he has to go: “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.”
In “Hannibal Rising” readers learn about Lecter’s early life in Eastern Europe from age 6 to 20, following the death of his entire family during World War Two.
A film version of the new novel from a screenplay by Harris is expected to be released in February 2007.
Harris’ only novel not dealing with Lecter is his first, “Black Sunday” in 1975, a best seller about a terrorist plot to blow up the Super Bowl with a bomb-laden blimp.

Harry Potter an airport security threat
British writer J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, says she had to fight airport security in New York to be allowed to carry her manuscript of the final book of the series onto her flight home to England.
“A large part of it is handwritten and there was no copy of anything I had done while in the U.S.,” Rowling wrote in her web diary.
The posting, which appeared on Wednesday, indicated that Rowling had been caught by heightened security measures put in place after Aug. 10 when British police foiled an alleged plot blow up planes headed for the United States.
Those measures meant people were unable to board planes with things such as laptops, liquids and even books.
Rowling managed to work some magic and convinced the security guards she and her manuscript were no threat.
“They let me take it on, thankfully, bound up in elastic bands,” said the 40-year-old writer, who considered taking a ship back to England.
Rowling had been in New York for a charity book reading along with fellow writers Stephen King and John Irving ó both of whom publicly pleaded with her not to kill off the young wizard at the heart of her books in the final instalment.
The author has said that two main characters will die but will not say who. She divulged in her web diary that she was pondering two possible titles for the last instalment of her wildly successful wizard-in-training series.
“I was quite happy with one of them until the other one struck me while I was taking a shower in New York,” she wrote.
“They would both be appropriate, so I think I’ll have to wait until I’m further into the book to decide which one works best.”
Fans of the Harry Potter series, which has sold more than 300 million books worldwide, are eagerly waiting to find out what happens when young Harry Potter is expected to engage in a final battle with his evil nemesis, Lord Voldemort.
Filming has begun on the fifth instalment of the movie franchise, Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix.

New Princess Di book coming out Sept. 12
NEW YORK – It was billed by its publisher as the “must-read” book for the fall ó “a shattering, provocative and mesmerizing true story” so momentous that booksellers were urged to order copies without knowing what they would receive.
Now, the secret is out: Publisher William Morrow confirmed Tuesday to The Associated Press that the mystery work is Paul Burrell’s “The Way We Were,” the latest tell-all about Princess Diana by her former butler, who also wrote the 2003 best seller, “A Royal Duty.”
Was it worth the suspense?
“I feel hoodwinked,” says Mark LaFramboise, a buyer for Politics & Prose, an independent store based in Washington, D.C. LaFramboise said he ordered 10-12 copies. “This is Washington and we thought it might have been a relevant political book. But this is nothing but publicity gimmickry. They should be ashamed of themselves.”
“I think it’s going to be a big book, although `shattering,’ I don’t know about that,” says Edward Ash-Milby, biography buyer for Barnes & Noble Inc. “I think there’s interest in anyone close to the inner circle, and he was as close to her as anyone.”
Lisa Gallagher, Morrow’s senior vice president, was not immediately available for comment.
According to a statement issued Tuesday by Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, “The Way We Were” takes “the reader into the lively day-to-day life at Kensington Palace and includes, for the first time ever, a uniquely personal record of that time.”
“With previously unseen photographs of the interiors, Burrell takes the reader from room to room, and from memory to memory, in a remarkably candid narrative that only he could tell,” the statement said.
Burrell’s book, a “follow-up” to “A Royal Duty,” goes on sale Sept. 12 with an announced first printing of 300,000.
The biggest news so far came out in an excerpt published last weekend in London’s Daily Mail. Burrell writes that Princess Diana had no plans to marry her companion, Dodi Fayed, who also died in the 1997 Paris car crash along with their driver, Henri Paul. Just days before the fatal accident, Dodi had reportedly given Diana a gold Bulgari ring.
“She made it clear this was not an engagement ring. It was nothing more than an addition to her collection of costume jewelry,” he writes. “She said how romantic he had been and giggled with relief that the ring had not been more significant. `Pheeeew!’ She gave an exaggerated sigh, suggesting she was happy and that engagement was the furthest thing from her mind.”
Burrell also wrote in “A Royal Duty” that Diana was not serious about Dodi, observing that “All the princess’ closest friends know the identity of the only man with whom she had enjoyed a happy, long-term relationship since her divorce. And it was not Dodi al Fayed.” The man’s name was not revealed.
Hoping to build interest in a book, publishers occasionally ask sellers to “order blind,” although usually at least some information is given. Stores, for instance, will be told that a new Oprah Winfrey pick is upcoming without knowing the actual selection.
“But Oprah is a known commodity,” LaFramboise of Politics & Prose said. “You know you’re going to sell a certain number of books.”
Ed Conklin, a manager for Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore in Beverly Hills, Calif., said he had only ordered a few copies of the Burrell book and called the Morrow campaign “a ploy on the publisher’s part to generate a buzz and artificially create a demand.”
“You hope that if it does take off, you can get more books quickly enough to cover yourself,” Conklin says. “But in this case, I don’t think we’re going to need to bother.”