Hulk Hogan wrote a book

And he'll be at Book Soup tonight to prove it. According to the bookstore, although there is no formal line, fans have arrived and are milling about.

Hulk Hogan is scheduled to appear at 7 p.m. with his book, "Hulk Hogan: My Life Outside the Ring." He seems like a rather unlikely author, but judging by the size of that bicep and those hands, I'm not saying anything more than that. Not saying anything more at all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Hulk Hogan with his memoir. Credit: Jeff Christensen / Associated Press

Philip Gourevitch to leave Paris Review

Philip Gourevitch will leave his position as editor of the Paris Review in April, the magazine announced today. Gourevitch, a former New Yorker staff writer who won the L.A. Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1998 book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda," plans to return to writing full time. He has been editor of the Paris Review for five years.

During Gourevitch's tenure, the Paris Review, one of the nation's leading literary journals, increased circulation and advertising revenue. It gave more attention to nonfiction pieces and to photography, while changing format slightly (it got taller). Gourevitch edited the magazine's series of books of its interviews with writers, now on its fourth volume. And the Paris Review also developed a genuine Web presence, putting piles of content online, including new stories, literary events, video and rich archives.  

"It has been a great honor -- and great fun -- to have relaunched this wonderful magazine," Gourevitch said in the press release. "I published my own first stories and reportage in quarterlies, and it’s thrilling to have been able to give a comparable opportunity to a host of uncommonly gifted new writers, who have appeared in the Review and are going on to forge the literature of our time. I’m forever grateful to the board of directors that entrusted me with this essential magazine -- and to the brilliant staff who have joined me in this labor of love."

The Paris Review was founded in 1953 by George Plimpton, William Pène du Bois, Thomas H. Guinzburg, Harold L. Humes and Peter Matthiessen. Plimpton was editor until his death in 2003; Matthiessen, who won the 2008 National Book Award for "Shadow Country," will lead the search committee for a new editor.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Philip Gourevitch in 2008. Credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Afghanistan's Malalai Joya speaks in So Cal

At age 27, Malalai Joya was the first woman elected to Afghanistan's parliament. She's an outspoken advocate for democracy -- so much so that she's been suspended from her job in the National Assembly for allegedly insulting her colleagues on television (the suspension has been criticized by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch). She's survived five assassination attempts and stays on the move to keep safe, although her friends will tell you that her car has been breaking down a lot lately. She's been the subject of a documentary and now has released a memoir, "A Woman Among Warlords"; tonight, she'll speak at All Saints Church in Pasadena.

Thursday afternoon, more than 50 Angelenos packed into a front room of a Beverly Hills home to hear Joya, who is fluent in English, speak about her experiences. About half were activists affiliated with the antiwar group Code Pink, and they were supportive of Joya's criticisms of the Obama administration's policies toward Afghanistan. "We must end this continuing occupation," she said to a round of applause, with all the conviction and modulation of a practiced politician.

Speaking with an accent that thickened as she gained momentum, Joya, who stands less than 5 feet tall, held the room in her sway. Her targets were warlords and corruption at home first, but it was her unflinching criticism of American policies that found traction with this peace-activist audience. "Democracy cannot be won by war," she said, to more applause. 

When she noted that a new report by the UNDP rated Afghanistan 181st out of 182 countries, one woman raised her hand. "What is UNDP?" she asked. About two-thirds of the crowd responded without hesitation: "The United Nations Development Program." Some women in the room had traveled to Afghanistan recently, and Joya appealed to their sense of connectedness. "The silence of good people is worse than the action of bad people," she urged, to more applause.

The cars parked on the street near the Beverly Hills home were an equal mix of middle-class sedans and high-end sports cars, with a generous smattering of KPFK stickers throughout. Southern California may be one of the few places in the country where dedicated peace activists dine within arms' reach of original art by modern masters. If Joya noticed any incongruity, she kept it to herself. She is a politician, after all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Malalai Joya speaks. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Jonathan Safran Foer Q&A: You gonna eat that?

Jonathan Safran Foer asks, what did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals? A take on that truth can be found in his occasionally inspiring, occasionally gruesome book "Eating Animals." It's the first major work of nonfiction by this award-winning novelist; he spent three years exploring the realities of animal husbandry in America. In her review, Susan Salter Reynolds writes that Foer has "a kind of fearless modernity: one part 'whatever,' one part descendant of Holocaust survivor (we've only got this one life, if that, to get things right) and one part soaringly beautiful, annoyingly entitled liberalism.... Think your way through it, Foer warns. Define the terms. Choose your priorities. You have that luxury."

Foer will be in Los Angeles this weekend, appearing at the Santa Monica Library on Saturday at 7 p.m., at a sold-out appearance at the Skirball Center Sunday afternoon and Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Sunday at 6:30 p.m. He spoke to Jacket Copy by phone.

Jacket Copy: In "Eating Animals," you really bring to life how horrifying factory farms are. I wonder, as a writer, what it was like to write that horror story.

Jonathan Safran Foer: I don't really think of it as a horror story, for a couple of reasons. One, it might very well have a happy ending. Two, there's plenty of moments of not only levity in it, but also joy, whether it comes in the form of my own memories of happy meals – not Happy Meals, from McDonald's, but meals that are happy – or days that I spent on really good farms. Obviously the book is about an industry that is almost entirely horrific, but the story is bigger than just that industry.

JC: You open with a story of generations – what food meant to your grandmother, your family growing up, and now you with a new son. Is choosing to be a vegetarian  a break from tradition, or can tradition accommodate change?

JSF: There are different kinds of traditions. My grandmother was not a vegetarian, and my parents are not vegetarians. On another hand, there's the tradition of wanting your actions to reflect your values. Or wanting to make good choices even when they're difficult or against certain instincts or cravings. Traditions happen on all sorts of levels, and sometimes we have to lose one tradition in order to maintain another.

JC: When you started the book, did you realize how important turkeys and Frank Reese's Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch  would be to telling the arc of the story?

JSF: No, I didn't know very much about Frank Reese. I mean, I'd read a bit about him, mostly because he wins all these taste tests – that's how he became a famous farmer, because he makes food that apparently is the best that anybody is making now. I was really moved -- I was moved by him, his story, his farm, the way he thinks about raising animals, the way he thinks about feeding people. If there's a hero of the book, in a certain way, he's it.

JC: You're going  on Martha Stewart right before Thanksgiving – are you going to talk turkey?

JSF: Presumably – I don't know. I don't boss her around, she bosses me around.

JC: Have you been on Martha Stewart before?

JSF: I was once, with my first book. I've gotten to know her a little bit just because she's very concerned about these issues. She's not a vegetarian herself, but she's a very very strong advocate of family farming, small farming.

JC: In the story you tell, factory farms are growing more and more powerful, to the detriment of more humane small farms. What lesson do you think we should take from that?

JSF: There are a lot of forces that are encouraging the growth of factory farms; they're enormously profitable precisely because they externalize all the real costs. We pay for it through subsidies, we pay for it through environmental degradation, that we are the ones who have to clean up. It's in their business model to destroy the environment. All these forces encouraging the growth of factory farms. It's very hard for small farmers, because it just costs more to raise animals the right way. Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat – to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it. And that's not something that's easy to tell everybody.

JC: How much do you see the book as an exploration, and how much as a call to action? 

Isabel Rucker's long, long memoir

Tonight the SOMArts Center in San Francisco holds an opening for two artists, including Isabel Rucker, whose very long memoir will be on display. How long, exactly? "The Unfurling" is more than 400 feet long, written and illustrated in graphic novel form on a 12-inch-high scroll. That's Rucker above, just after finishing the installation this week.

Rucker, who is the daughter of science fiction author and cyberpunk visionary Rudy Rucker, began work on "The Unfurling" seven years ago when she lived in San Francisco. It details both her city life and her move to rural Wyoming, off the grid. Using the scroll -- technically, three separate 150-foot rolls of paper -- allowed her to vary the width of the panels. While some are compressed, others are quite broad. The illustration of a road trip from California to Wyoming is more than 10 feet long.

 

"Initially I didn't have Jack Kerouac in mind, but after starting it, I did." Rucker told Jacket Copy via e-mail. "I love 'On the Road' and any other writing by him. A couple of years ago I had the joy of seeing the 'On the Road' scroll in person at the NYC library. It was amazing. I like to think there is a somewhat stream of consciousness similarity. I didn't have an outline for the story."

What could be the future for a graphic memoir that's 400 feet long? While "On the Road" was broken up into pages and published in book form, the design of the "The Unfurling," with its extra-wide panels, seems to resist that. Could a project like this be published as a scroll, sold in bookshelf-friendly tubes?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos, from top: Isabel Rucker with the installation of "The Unfurling"; an excerpt. Credits: Isabel Rucker

'XKCD: Volume 0' is sticking it to traditional publishers

What's the most stupidly ambitious aspect of "XKCD: Volume 0," the book based on the wildly popular yet still very underground webcomic:

• Is it the assumption that cartoonist Randall Munroe's uber tech-savvy audience would pay for a hard-copy version of the comic strips it gets for free in a comprehensive online archive?
• Is it that Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Conde Nast's Reddit, turned his "un-corporation" Breadpig into a publishing company for his friend Munroe's book, while Munroe, 25, declined several offers from established publishers, despite their persistence? "I kind of make it hard to e-mail me," Munroe said on the phone from Somerville, Mass.
• Or how about the pledge to build a $32,000 school in Laos from a portion of book sales without the luxury of advertising or having copies on major bookstore shelves?

You're right if you guessed all -- or none -- of the above.

"XKCD: Volume 0" is a gamble that's paying off for Munroe, a former NASA contractor who left to pursue stick-figure cartooning full-time.

The first run of 10,000 books is almost sold out. Ohanian's half-baked publishing project has attracted dozens of uninvited proposals from authors. And the school in Laos, whose $32,000 goal was reached shortly after the first two book signings in San Francisco and New York, is almost constructed.

Gregory Maguire, author of 'Wicked,' does a good deed

Gregory Maguire, author of seven books for adults and five for young readers, is probably best known for "Wicked," his retelling of "The Wizard of Oz" from the witch's point of view.

But creating stories that explore the nature of evil, or what we perceive as evil, hasn't made him bad. In fact, he's done something very good with his new book, "The Next Queen of Heaven." A comic novel set in upstate New York in late 1999, the book features a teen girl as troublesome as they come; her devout mother, who, after a bump on the head from a religious statue, either begins speaking in her own profane code or in tongues; a local semi-out choirmaster; and a surprising nun. Maguire moves easily in and out of even minor characters, so the town comes alive in many dimensions, most of them funny and slightly bonkers.

Did I mention that "The Next Queen of Heaven" is free?

That's the good part. Maguire has chosen to publish the book with the Concord Free Press, which will distribute all 2,500 copies of the novel, for free, to anyone who asks. They ask two things in return:

• That you make a donation to charity and tell them what it was.
• That you pass on the book and ask the next reader to do the same.

So far, more than $97,000 has been donated through the distribution of its books -- Maguire's, which has been out for just a couple of weeks, is the publishing house's third.

"I admire that the books as well as the publishing model raise questions about art's inherent value and the commodification of content," Maguire says in the book's press materials. "I like knowing that this book is out in the world, helping generate donations for great causes."

It's not Maguire's first good deed -- he founded a children's literacy nonprofit in New England way back in 1987.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Gregory Maguire. Credit: Chitose Suzuki / Associated Press

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A Lion Among Men: Volume Three of the Wicked Years

Vibe Mag returns with Chris Brown on the cover

When Vibe Magazine closed its doors in June, there was a chorus of sadness -- for that magazine's coverage of hip-hop and other music, and for music magazines in general. Two months later, a group of investors stepped in with plans to revive it, both online and in print.

The first edition of the new print Vibe is due to hit stands Dec. 8, and it's bound to stir up controversy. The cover will feature Chris Brown, who pleaded not guilty to assaulting Rihanna in August and has been on tour this fall. Actually, that's half the print run -- the other half will feature rapper Drake. But for all Drake's visibility, Brown's notoriety is already drawing attention.

Advertising Age observes:

If the choice [of Brown] succeeds in generating the buzz that's intended, Vibe's cover will show off the power that print can still wield. Putting a feature about the tarnished pop star online alone, by contrast, probably wouldn't stand to get the same attention.

The new Vibe will print just four times a year; Vibe.com, the new owners insist, is the hub. "Whether it's the magazine, or we decide to do some kind of TV programming down the line," editor in chief Jermaine Hall told Advertising Age, "everything needs to come back to Vibe.com."

Meanwhile, the often snarky Village Voice is pulling for Vibe, in whatever forms it takes.

We wish them luck--may they make enough money to employ all those they once laid off and perhaps, along the way, revive a magazine that was almost always essential, even at the very end.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Chris Brown performs in October 2009. Credit: Jason Kempin/Getty Images

LA inkSlam poetry festival includes heavy-spitters

Those who want to see lively live poetry should not miss the inkSlam Los Angeles Poetry Festival, which kicks off Wednesday and runs through Saturday The lineup features more than 50 poets, including seven national poetry slam champions and nine regional champions. Shihan, above, is one of four poets who have appeared on "Def Poetry Jam" on HBO.

Shihan is one of the four founders of "Da' Poetry Lounge," L.A.'s largest weekly poetry open-mic night. It takes place every Tuesday at the Greenway Court Theater, which is where the inkSlam festival is being held. The theater is at 544 N. Fairfax Ave., adjacent to the Fairfax High School campus.

The Greenway Arts Alliance operates arts education programs for Fairfax High students as well as the theater, and is a sponsor of the inkSlam festival. It's keeping the theater open during the day for workshops, focusing on the art and the business of being a poet. At night, there are performers' showcases -- and the high-octane poetry slam competition. Tickets run from $5 to $20.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Truman Capote's sexy gaze and other book ads: A Q&A with Dwight Garner

In "Read Me," Dwight Garner compiles a century of print ads for books, funny and formal, subtle and sensational. Garner is a longtime book critic at the New York Times, where he also has blogged at Paper Cuts. For his book, he went deep into the archives -- of his own paper and other venues. Isolated, in "Read Me," on pages with white or black backgrounds, the ads bear the markings of having been physical artifacts -- they reveal uneven printing, the wear of ink rubbing off paper, shadows of what was printed on the reverse, even the shadow of a fold. As Garner explains in his decade-by-decade introductions, the ads are simultaneously commerce, art and a reflection of what's buzzing in the literary culture.

Jacket Copy: You write that the first print advertisement for anything was for a book.

Dwight Garner: Yes. It was for a very odd-sounding book, called “Perfect Occurrences of Every Daie journall in Parliament, and Other Moderate Intelligence.” The book was printed in London, and it’s a very convoluted ad, but it’s the first one. It includes the world “applauded” -- it’s a very dense ad, but I think if someone were to reprint that ad today, the world “applauded” would be at the top in 18-point type, with exclamation points.

JC: What was the genesis of your book?

DG: I was doing various research over time, looking for old reviews, old articles, old pieces of criticism, to write pieces I was writing or to edit pieces. I would come across, in magazines or newspapers, these fantastic old ads for books. Some of these ads were so striking, so rich with historical information about not only the books, but how books were sold at certain periods in our culture. I started collecting them. I began to go into  more archives, some of them paper archives, some electronic, grabbing these things. I just sort of fell in love with them.

JC: I imagine you have more than made it into the book.

DG: Oh yeah, we cut hundreds out, and it was a brutal process. I think there’s 300 or 400 in there now, which is quite a lot, but the book could have been twice as big. I think there are more out there for people to find. It’s funny that a project like this hasn’t been done before; they’re fascinating documents. I think we’ve boiled it down to a pretty great selection just from this century.

JC: It’s interesting to me that they’ve been removed from their contexts.

DG: They were from newspaper pages, and we singled them out as individual works of art.

JC: As you were flipping through those pages, how did these particular ads jump out at you?

DG: I looked for books that I love. I was particularly interested in the way literary fiction and literary books were marketed in America during this past century. I focused on well-known books, I focused on literary books, I focused on ads that were particularly striking, that had a distinctive look and really jumped off the page in some way.

JC: Like the Truman Capote ad [pictured]?

DG: That’s one of the most famous author photographs of all time. When that book was first published, I don’t think people had seen author photographs like that. That come-hither look that Capote is giving, lying in that chair the way he is, that stare is just so gripping and so strangely sexy. I think it caught people off guard in 1948, people just weren’t ready for that kind of direct sexual gaze. I think in the end it really helped to sell the book. 

JC: As a book critic, it's your job to read new books. Did you find yourself wanting to read any of these books after reading the ads?

DG: There were a lot of books that really appealed to me. I had never read Lillian Smith's "Strange Fruit," for example -- that's a book that I now plan to read. There's this very strange travel book called "Letter of Credit" by Jerome Weidman, published in 1940, which has one of the most hilarious ads in the book. The headline on the ad is "Not from the marijuana department." The ad is all about how the reviews for this book have been so great that it sounds like the in-house publicity department had been smoking marijuana while putting the ad together. It's just hilarious. But actually you look at the reviews, and they are fairly terrific, and it does make me want to know who Jerome Weidman is, because I don't know who he is. I've never read any Jerome Weidman. There were a number of books like that.

After the jump: How not to sell Cormac McCarthy.

A 'Twilight' satire dawns with 'Nightlight'

Strange things happen when a book series sells 70 million copies. Fan sites are built, only to crash with onslaughts of visitors. Movies are made, drawing unruly mobs of screaming fans. Entire towns are invaded by giggling, teenage girls.

Today, just weeks before "New Moon," the second film in Stephenie Meyer’s perennially bestselling "Twilight" saga hits theaters, "Nightlight" lands in bookstores. It's a parody written by the Harvard Lampoon, an ever-changing group of Ivy League undergrads who’ve been skewering populist literature since 1876.

Penned by four Harvard students -- two sophomore women and two senior men -- "Nightlight" is a quick-reading, comedic sendup of the 544-page tome that’s grown into a cultural phenomenon. Its 154 pages follow the "Twilight" template but change every detail, from the glossy black cover with a chewed-to-the core apple to the come-hither copy on the back jacket, which reads: "About three things I was absolutely certain. First, Edwart was most likely my soul mate, maybe."

A computer geek with an awful name and even worse affliction -- nosebleeds -- Edwart Mullen is not a vampire, much as his classmate and wannabe love interest would like to believe. The U-Haul-driving Belle Goose is a recent transplant to the incredibly soggy Oregon town of Switchblade. An epic klutz who regularly knocks over her classmates like bowling pins and believes everyone from the mailman to the IRS agent to the entire male population of Switchblade High is in love with her, Belle is nevertheless "in the deepest love that has ever occurred in the history of the world" with Edwart.

"Looking into his eyes I felt waves of electricity, currents of electrons charging towards me. Was this how it felt to be in love ... for robots?"

The freckled and redheaded Edwart, she is convinced, is irresistibly attracted to the scent of her blood, which she describes as "grapefruit." And Belle is fatefully drawn to Edwart, whose reckless driving pose an extreme danger should the two become romantically involved.

While hardcore "Twilight" fans may not appreciate Harvard Lampoon humor, anyone who’s enjoyed the books but questioned the series' cult status are likely to be highly entertained. Can "New Spoons" be far behind?

-- Susan Carpenter

Photo: Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in a scene from "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," which opens Nov. 20. Credit: Kimberley French / Summit Entertainment

Author Marie NDiaye is the first black woman to win the Prix Goncourt

France's top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, was awarded today to French Senagalese author Marie NDiaye for her novel "Trois Femmes Puissantes" ("Three Powerful Women"). It is the first time a black woman has received the award.

Last week, NDiaye told the news agency AFP that she "never thought of it in those terms: 'black woman' and 'Goncourt,' " the Guardian reports. "I find it impossible to see things that way," she said. "I don't represent anything or anyone. I have met many French people raised in Africa who are more African than I am." But at the ceremony in Paris, she said, "I am very happy to be a woman receiving the Goncourt," the BBC reports. "This prize is an unexpected reward for 25 years of persistence."

NDiaye, 42, published her first novel at 17. She moved to Berlin in 2007, the BBC reports, "after President Nicolas Sarkozy won the election, saying she finds France under his rule 'monstrous' and 'vulgar.' "

The Prix Goncourt's preeminence helps books find their way to -- or remain on -- bestseller lists. But the financial reward that comes with it -- about $15 -- is a mere token. Previous winners include Marguerite Marguerite Duras, for "The Lover," Georges Duhamel for "Civilization" and Simone de Beauvoir for "The Mandarins."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Marie NDiaye surrounded by reporters after the announcement. Credit: Christophe Ena / Associated Press

Stephen Elliott's unique confessional

If you're literary and on the Web, chances are you already know Stephen Elliott. The candid editor of the arts and culture site the Rumpus sends out almost-daily missives; he sent copies of his book "The Adderall Diaries" to people who made online requests; he's used new online connections to set up an unorthodox national book tour and blogged about it. And close to 1,000 people follow him @S___Elliott on Twitter.

Now more people know Elliott and his latest book; he's profiled in today's L.A. Times by Scott Timberg.

"People tell me, 'Oh, you've had a hard life,' " the San Francisco writer says at a shady cafe in Los Feliz on a recent trip to Los Angeles. "But compared to the kids I was in group homes with, I know their stories are worse than my story. If writing was just a competition as to who's had the hardest life, that's not a contest I want to win."

"The Adderall Diaries" is neither a Kerouac-like brag, nor an "Oprah"-ready, James Frey-style record of suffering and recovery. Rather, it is its own weird hybrid, a painfully honest and meticulously crafted memoir wrapped around a true-crime story that gets to the very essence of its time and place.

In April, Stephen Elliott talked to Jacket Copy about the Rumpus.

We focus on regular culture, not pop culture, and we try to introduce people to art they might not have heard of. At the same time, we kind of follow the rules of the Internet, which are still being formed. Our target audience is smart temps. We update at least 10 times a day. Our original features and interviews tend to be around 1,500 words, intelligent content you can read while your boss is focusing on something else. If you're wasting time, it's better to waste it on the Rumpus reading an oral history.

Or, you know, a book blog of your choice.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo is courtesy of Graywolf Press

Zombies, classics and you

Even if it makes Jane Austen roll over in her grave, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" -- a mash-up version of her classic written by Seth Grahame-Smith -- has been taking a bite out of bestseller lists since its release. 

"Subconsciously, Austen was writing a horror novel and didn't know it," Grahame-Smith told the LA Times in April. "People taking these strolls, riding their carriages to and fro. . . . There are so many opportunities there -- for zombie attacks."

Publisher Quirk Books noticed an opportunity too: It's at liberty to mash up Austen's regency dramas because her works, published between 1811 and 1818, are in the public domain. So are lots of other books too, but few have the sustained popularity of Austen's or mesh so oddly with zombies and ninjas. And, most recently, octopuses and giant lobsters -- in September, Quirk issued its first follow-up, "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters."

Last week, Quirk announced the next project, a prequel, "Dawn of the Dreadfuls," which promises to explain how 18th century England became infested with the lurching undead. Simultaneously, it launched a website dedicated to its classic-literature mash-ups.

But is the publisher too late to capitalize on the buzz that first book created? You'd think that with the ongoing popularity of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," people might have something to say. But so far, its message boards have been quiet, save for a couple of questions about how Jane Austen can share co-author credit for a prequel she never wrote. The new book has a new co-author, Steve Hockensmith. Will it be more zombie-ninja-Austen fun? Or has the shtick run its course?

As for Grahame-Smith, he's departed from the land of Austen and zombies; he recently turned in a draft of his latest novel, "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter." 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Quirk Books

Does AC/DC matter?

In the trim but meaty 130 pages of "Why AC/DC Matters," longtime rock writer Anthony Bozza makes the case for the Australian band that's been blasting hard rock at high volume since the early 1970s. The book's cover -- black with silver-and-red foil text and a pair of devil horns -- is sure to hook the band's fans.

But can it convince the casual listener that the men behind "Highway to Hell," "Big Balls," "Back in Black," "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" and "You Shook Me All Night Long" are, as Bozza claims, "the greatest living rock band"?

Bozza's strategy is to explain how the band itself developed its signature sound. The guitar playing of brothers Malcolm and Angus Young is key, synchronized with a kind of mysterious sibling timing. Their Scottish family -- with eight kids -- moved to Australia in the 1960s. Brother George became an Australian pop star in the Beatles-esque band the Easybeats and went on to produce AC/DC records.

The monster guitar brothers needed a vocalist, and they found their match in Bon Scott, who took the debauched-rock-idol lifestyle to the extreme and lived to sing about it. Until February 1980, when he died at age 33, passed out in the back seat of a car in London. (His official cause of death was recorded as "acute alcohol poisoning" and the enviable "death by misadventure.") Scott died on the eve of the band recording "Back in Black," and AC/DC's replacement, Brian Johnson, was miraculously able to do what Scott had done before. He continues that tradition today. Bozza points out some lyrical differences between the two and notes that Scott was a more out-of-control presence on stage -- but points out that AC/DC went for consistency over change when Johnson joined the band.

If there's one thing AC/DC has been, it's consistent, despite a handful of lineup changes. This seems to be, at least in part, why the band hasn't gotten much critical attention. If AC/DC did one thing and did it very, very, well, it wasn't the next thing that critics watch for. In fact, Bozza maintains that the band has been sorely overlooked, and spends a significant amount of energy arguing against the critical take on AC/DC.

But the critics aren't the point; popularity is. "Back in Black" is the fifth-bestselling album in U.S. history. According to this book -- which may or may not have been able to tally the recent resurgence of Michael Jackson -- since 1991, AC/DC has outsold Madonna, Michael Jackson the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin and is second in sales only to the Beatles.

Bozza finds the answer to AC/DC's popularity in the band being true to themselves, which explains both their static sound and the fact that this book is mostly an inwardly focused band biography. But would anyone say that the Beatles or David Bowie or David Byrne or Joni Mitchell -- changeling musicians all -- were untrue to themselves? Truth in creativity doesn't necessarily mean sameness. That AC/DC is genuine doesn't seem to be the whole story.

If Bozza never questions what about 35-year-old rock songs make enthralled fans pump their fists, it's because he isn't dealing here with the cultural context. But in chronicling AC/DC's powerful stage show, which remains as manic as ever, Bozza quotes drummer Tommy Lee (Motley Crue, etc.), who seems to get at the heart of the band's appeal. "To me, AC/DC are exactly how a rock band should be -- how simple it all should be and how good you can do it if you give it your all. I just saw them this past year and they were still just so good live. The show was everything you'd want it to be: too loud and just ... insane. It reminded me of why I do what I do. That one show made me feel 17 again."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Brian Johnson, left and Angus Young, right, perform in Anaheim in 1996. Credit:  Los Angeles Times

William T. Vollmann's pistol-packing past

In our pages today, books editor David L. Ulin profiles William T. Vollmann, the 50-year-old author of mammoth, prizewinning works. His new book, "Imperial," is a 1,300-page complex and layered look at California's Imperial County. Ulin writes:

To write it, he spent 10 years visiting Imperial County, interviewing hundreds of people, reading history and public records, soaking up folklore. The result is a hybrid -- curious only if you're unfamiliar with Vollmann's work -- a massive, multilayered look at the border region of southeastern California, from the Colorado River to the Coachella Valley, Mexicali to the Salton Sea. Merging journalism and narrative, sociology and myth, the book is less about Imperial County than the place Vollmann calls Imperial, which exists most firmly in his mind.

Vollmann, who has put himself in harm's way in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Arctic Circle in order to write about them, once brought that sense of danger to his readings. In August of 1992, he came to Beyond Baroque in Venice, and Susan Salter-Reynolds was there:

It's the ides of August. Literary life across the country slows to a halfhearted crawl. But in Venice, Calif., in the old City Hall built in 1907, writers in Beyond Baroque's Reading Series continue to push the limits of literature.

The Reading Series hosts 80 authors a year. On a recent muggy Friday night we went out to hear a double bill: Darius James and William Vollmann, two brave new authors. Vollmann, whose most recent books are "Fathers and Crows" and "An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World," has gotten a lot of mainstream praise in the publishing world, and has been compared to Pynchon and Burroughs. He looks, however, like someone who just walked off the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. It wasn't the plaid shirt or the farmer's hat that said "butterfly." It was the metal case that looked as though it once held a high-school clarinet. From it, Vollmann unpacked a small revolver, scanning the audience with his computer-programmer eyes. To punctuate the reading, Vollmann would point the gun at the ceiling and fire. Blanks, but in a black room rapidly filling with smoke and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, who can be sure? By the third shot, anxiety made it impossible to concentrate on the story Vollmann was reading. (For the record, it was about the Iroquois, and it contained several graphic descriptions of torture.)

Salter-Reynolds writes that she cornered James to ask about his work. Vollmann, she left alone.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: William T. Vollmann in 2009. Credit: Robert Durell / For The Times

A 'Dracula' sourcebook that will stoke fans

It’s probably no surprise, but vampires are No. 2 on the list of top adult Halloween costumes this year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. (No. 1, by the way, is witch; No. 3, pirate.) Thanks to a string of successful books, movies and TV shows, these creatures of the night are mainstream.

"Vampires no longer appall us or even stir superstitions," wrote Richard Rayner, who recently reviewed an anthology of vampire stories for us Sunday. "These days a vampire is much more likely to rise up in a high school corridor than from the graveyard mists of some decaying Eastern European pile."

What is surprising, however, is how easy it is to miss the reference to "Dracula" in Bram Stoker's 1912 obituary in the Times of London, one of many documentary materials provided in "Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'," edited by Elizabeth Miller. It was Stoker's association with actor Henry Irving that was most remembered at the time of his death, while the granddaddy of all vampire novels was dismissed near the obit's end as an example of "a particularly florid and creepy kind of fiction."

Miller's excellent book gathers vampire lore and history (the first vampire treatise was written in 1645 by a Greek theologian), poems and stories before Stoker (including a poem by Goethe and John Polidori's Byron-inspired story), the circumstances of Stoker's composition of "Dracula" and a look at the novel's critical and popular influence (I didn't expect a mention of "Twilight" or Sookie Stackhouse; but it's a little strange to find a listing, in Miller's bibliography/checklist of reading, for a preface written by actor Frank Langella but no mention of Elizabeth Kostova's enormously successful novel "The Historian" or Leslie Klinger's annotated edition of "Dracula" published by W.W. Norton).

You'll find yourself enchanted by this book for hours. "Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'" does an invaluable service to anyone interested in this subject but without the time, or a decent search engine, to do the research themselves. 

Nick Owchar

Photo: Tom Hewitt in a production of "Dracula, The Musical" (2001); credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Paranormal activity at Wilde's Canterville

When it comes to handling ghosts, the characters in Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” (in a new recording from Naxos Audio Books) are far bolder than Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.” When Marley’s ghost comes rattling his chains, you may remember, the old miser drops his gruffness in the face of his old associate’s awful warnings. Not Wilde's Hiram B. Otis, an “American minister” who purchases an English country house and moves in with his family despite dire warnings that it is haunted. 

The ghost, Sir Simon Canterville — who’s been scaring the daylights out of the house’s inhabitants since his death in 1584 — wastes no time in mounting a haunt. In the dead of night, Otis hears chains clanking in the halls and beholds an awful sight:

Right in front of him he saw, in the wan moonlight, an old man of terrible aspect. His eyes were as red burning coals; long grey hair fell over his shoulders in matted coils; his garments, which were of antique cut, were soiled and ragged, and from his wrists and ankles hung heavy manacles and rusty gyves.

“My dear sir,” said Mr. Otis, “I really must insist on your oiling those chains, and have brought you for that purpose a small bottle of the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator.”

Oiling those chains! Rupert Degas is pitch-perfect in the Naxos recording -- quite a departure from some of his previous Naxos recordings, including Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and Kafka’s “The Trial.” The grimness and desperation of those stories is far from the desperation Sir Simon faces with the Otises. No matter what he does, he can’t bloody well scare them! The couple’s twins boys hit him in the knees with pea-shooters, and, when Mrs. Otis hears the ghost’s terrible laugh, her reaction is: “I am afraid you are far from well ... and have brought you a bottle of Dr. Dobell’s tincture. If it is indigestion, you will find it a most excellent remedy.”

Degas captures the nasally voices of the Americans (for Wilde, Americans are the ones with the accents) and Sir Simon’s exasperated harrumphs — which turn, later, into sighs of relief as somebody finally pities him: the Otises’ daughter, Virginia. Degas gives listeners a hilarious performance that's an ideal antidote for the shivers if you've seen “Paranormal Activity.”

-- Nick Owchar

Oscar Wilde photo courtesy of Associated Press

Comin' at ya! Book reviews on an iconic boxer, freakonomics, Frankenstein [updated]

In our pages this week, Tim Rutten reviewed "Sweet Thunder" by Will Heygood, a biography of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Robinson is "now universally acknowledged as the greatest prizefighter who ever lived," Rutten writes:

Anyone who ever saw him in the ring, or has watched a film of one of his bouts, understands why boxing fans paradoxically insist on calling their sport "the sweet science." .... Haygood gives a fine account of Robinson's career in the dazzlingly competitive welter- and middleweight ranks of his era, but where this lyrically written biography -- with its jazz-inflected prose -- truly excels is in its evocation of the culturally rich post-renaissance Harlem, where Robinson began boxing as a ninth-grade dropout.

Earlier in the week, reviewer Greg Hess weighed in on Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s "Superfreakonomics," a follow-up to "Freakonomics," the authors' 2005 bestseller.

They do not pretend in "Super Freakonomics" to be our economic saviors. They don't provide solutions to the financial crisis, subprime debt, CEO compensation or a template for healthcare reform. Rather, the Steves wryly, humorously and almost sadistically remind us that we are slaves to our own failures to parse situations into basic economic components.

And we're feeling Halloween-y with two more reviews. Today it's "The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" by Peter Ackroyd, in which Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley meet the real Victor Frankenstein. Reviewer Thane Rosenbaum writes:

Ackroyd, a biographer and novelist who is at his best when he reanimates the historical figures of London's past and transforms them into his own fictional characters, has a splendid time imagining Mary Shelley and her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with Lord Byron, the poet rock star of his age, befriending a melancholy Swiss scientist named Victor Frankenstein.

In a novel in which even Coleridge has a cameo, Frankenstein is the only true fictional major player. In Ackroyd's imagination, Frankenstein is more than just slumming in Mary Shelley's head; he's doubling down on the entire doppelgänger motif. Despite being surrounded by such literary flamboyance -- indeed, the holy trinity of British Romanticism -- this Frankenstein is no slouch when it comes to his own creative ambitions.

The novel, part mystery, part polemic on the life force of the imagination, is a reminder that novelists are in the monster-making business -- even those who failed chemistry in high school.

And in tomorrow's paper -- online now -- take a step through "The Gates" by John Connolly. The young adult horror novel, about a boy and his dog who inadvertently stumble upon the Gates of Hell, is reviewed by Denise Hamilton. It "has a shot at becoming a middle-school Halloween classic," she writes, because it is

a laugh-out-loud funny tale about a boy who must find a way to close the gates of hell (and save humanity!) after his goofy neighbors accidentally open them during a séance, unleashing a horde of demons.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

[update: the original version of this post mistakenly referred to Sugar Ray Robinson as Sugar Ray Leonard]

Photo: Sugar Ray Robinson in 1962. Credit: Hulton Deutsch / Allsport

What is good writing, exactly?

 Something strange is happening in England: the National Academy of Writing has launched the first Good Writing Awards. Aren't all the existing literary awards -- the Man Booker and the Pulitzer, the Nobel and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the National Book Awards and the Printz as well as countless others -- already awarding good writing?

Maybe so, but the Good Writing Awards are distinguished in two ways. First, the National Academy of Writing is soliciting nominations from the public on its website -- its members "want to hear the British people expressing their opinions," rather than asking a group of professionals to make the decisions (although professionals will be on the judging panel).  The other distinguishing characteristic is that it's not asking for whole books --  only for 100 to 1,000-word excerpts. For those of you who don't count words for a living, that's anywhere from a paragraph to about four pages. "The upper limit has been set," the website proclaims, "because good writing ought to be able to demonstrate its quality in less than 1,000 words."

In two categories -- instruction manuals and business/government writing -- this strategy will certainly generate interesting results.

But setting those aside, it seems to be an upside-down way of casting attention on close reading in longer works. Four pages of a play, nonfiction book or novel -- the other three categories in this competition -- could be much better than the work as a whole. Even a short story could begin with a brilliant paragraph and then devolve into a mass of cardboard characters in a plotless mess.

Isn't one of the things that makes a piece of writing resonate how it fits into the larger piece? Cordelia's arguments with her father might come off as whiny if you didn't realize what was happening in "King Lear." Doesn't "...and yes I said yes I will Yes" carry such resonance because it comes after more than 700 pages of "Ulysses," instead of somewhere in the middle?

Can the texture of writing be isolated from a work as a whole?

-- Carolyn Kellogg