Thirteen people have been arrested in Turkey, charged with plotting to kill the writer Orhan Pamuk. The author has long been the target of threats and was prosecuted last year for "insulting Turkishness" in his writings. Among those arrested are a retired general and the lawyer who brought charges against Pamuk and several other writers.
Paul Rand (1914-1996) was a giant in American graphic design. You've seen his work even if you don't know it--he created the logos for ABC, IBM, and even Enron, to name just a few. He was also a book and cover designer, and that work is the subject of a lecture by current design heavyweight Stephen Heller, part of the Paul Rand Lecture Series from New York's School of Visual Arts. 
Susan Wicklund, author of This Common Secret: My Journey As an Abortion Doctor talks to salon.com about wearing a bulletproof vest to work and why she's hopeful about the future of reproductive rights nonetheless. Read it here.
Naturalist Paul Tolme was shocked to see that his descriptions of black-footed ferrets (originally published on the Defenders of Wildlife website--have apparently made their way--uncredited--into a bodice-ripper by the name of Shadow Bear. The book--like the ferrets--is not tame. Details are here at Newsweek.--David E
It's often worthwhile to check out the Times of London's "Book Extracts" page, but you sometimes have to skip the UK books you'll never see from people you've never heard of. And yet...
From alternativereel.com comes this list of America's top ten drunk authors. To paraphrase Lincoln talking about the perennially soused General Grant, send a bottle to the budding authors in your contacts.--David E
Publishers Weekly has announced that the third installment of Christopher Paolini's Inheritance trilogy (along with Eragon and Eldest) will be called Brisingr. It will be released at midnight On September 20. 
The National Book Critics Circle has announced the nominees for its yearly prizes. The list is rather too long to cite in full (see it here), but I'll draw your attention to one of the fiction titles: Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's the story of a boy in the police state of Muammar Quadafi's Libya who both uses and is used by the system of betrayal and informers. Even I, who avoids fiction for the most part, liked this one, and that's saying something.--David E
In response to last year's enlarged smoking ban in the UK, London's Tank Books produced a series of literary classics packaged in cigarette boxes. Titles by Conrad, Kipling, and Kafka are among the works available to nicotine-deprived readers. They call the books "Tales to Take Your Breath Away."
I somehow missed the fact that Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, is from St Louis Park. Leave it to MinnPost to keep me informed. Weisman talked to the Post about writing, touring, and how growing up with creosote in the drinking water made him an environmentalist.--David E
According to the Iceland Review, homegrown crime writing is topping the charts on the North Atlantic island. Arnaldur Indridason's latest novel Hardskafi has sold a whopping 30,000 copies--in a country of only 300,000. That's the fastest selling Icelandic book ever. (Ísafold says that "Arnaldur er í toppformi.") 
Indridason's earlier novel Jar City is the only one available in English as yet. But "Nordic Noir" is hot now, with publishers scrambling to find the next Henning Mankel. Wisconsin Public Radio's excellent program To the Best of Our Knowledge ran a good summary of the genre last month (here). You have to wade through the entire show for the book segment, but that's no hardship.--David E
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West by the late Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto (which you heard about here earlier) will be released on February 12.--David E
I've just discovered that the Financial Times newspaper reviews audiobooks. On the page now are reviews of Patricia Cornwell's thriller The Book of the Dead and Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.--David E
I can only guess that if you're an actor and you live long enough, you are somehow forced to write a children's book. Jamie Lee Curtis, Julianne Moore, and John Lithgow all have thin tomes on the short shelves.
I'm a sucker for photo books that catalog repeated instances of the same thing. (I honestly believe that the brightest undiscovered gem in our store at the moment has to be Minnesota Ice Arenas, a compendium of stats and pictures of every hockey venue in the North Star State.) 
The next meeting of the Twin Cities' most unusual and interesting book club is Tuesday, January 8. Books & Bars meets at Bryant-Lake Bowl, 810 W Lake Street, in Minneapolis. Doors open at 6:00pm; the discussion begins at 7:00pm.
January's book is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert, who works in what he calls happiness studies, explores the question of why humans as a group are so bad at predicting what will actually make us happy. A partial explanation: "When we have an experience . . . on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time," he writes. "Psychologists calls this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage." To get the full story, you'll have to read the book, but you can read the first chapter here to get started immediately. 
