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Charlaine Harris, the bestselling Ace author of eight Southern Vampire novels that are the basis for HBO’s new television series “True Blood,” dominates the October 5th New York Times mass market fiction list with an incredible seven titles appearing simultaneously:

Dead Until Dark (Ace Books, 2008) is #3; Living Dead in Dallas (Ace Books, 2002) is #11; Club Dead (Ace Books, 2003) is #14; Dead as a Doornail (Ace Books, 2006) is #16; Dead to the World (Ace Books, 2005) is #17; All Together Dead (Ace Books, 2008) is #18; and Definitely Dead (Ace Books, 2007) is #19.

This unprecedented showing comes on the heels of the September 7th premiere of “True Blood” on HBO. Created by Alan Ball, who also wrote the movie American Beauty and created another HBO series “Six Feet Under,” “True Blood,” with series episodes premiering on HBO Sunday nights at 9pm, is based on a series of books by Harris that follows telepathic cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse. The show has already been renewed by HBO for a second season.

Ginjer Buchanan, Editor-in-Chief of Ace Books said, “As Charlaine’s editor, it’s exciting — and gratifying — to see that the readers who bought Dead Until Dark after watching the first episodes of Alan Ball’s most excellent “True Blood” were so captivated by her writing that they went back to their bookstores and picked up the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse novels!”

Watch a QuickTime trailer for the HBO original series “True Blood”, based on Charlaine Harris’ Dead Until Dark.

2008 National Book Festival Features Penguin Group (USA) Authors

The 2008 National Book Festival, an annual event organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by First Lady Laura Bush, will be held this Saturday, September 27th on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Free and open to the public, the festival features more than 70 award-winning authors, illustrators and poets appearing in "Fiction & Fantasy," "Mysteries & Thrillers," "History & Biography," "Children," "Teens & Children," "Poetry," and "Home & Family" pavilions. In addition, fun activities that promote reading will be set up for children in the popular "Let's Read America" pavilion.

Eight authors from Penguin Group (USA) will be participating in the Festival this year: Geraldine Brooks (Viking/Penguin); James McBride (Riverhead); Bob Schieffer (Putnam); Daniel Schorr (Penguin); and Gordon Wood (The Penguin Press), as well as Penguin Young Readers Group authors Jan Brett, who illustrated all of the artwork for this year’s official National Book Festival literature and promotional pieces including the poster shown here; Jon Scieszka; and Joseph Bruchac. Each author will give a 30-minute presentation in one of the pavilions, and also sit for an hour-long booksigning. In addition, the authors also have the opportunity to attend the black-tie National Book Festival Gala, held on Friday night, September 26th, and a kick-off breakfast at the White House, held on Saturday morning. Both of these events will be hosted by First Lady Laura Bush.

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Why this book now?

Drugs seem to be a rather timeless subject (check the opium recipes of the ancient Romans in our book) but lately there were a lot of celebrities struggling with substance use and abuse. The craze and hypocrisy surrounding these stories caused a) an unsurpressable curiosity regarding the effect of drugs on people, politics and culture and b) an urge to take a sober look on drugs: nonjudgmental, bipartisan and thorough.

Where does this book come from?

The idea was born in a bar in Berlin/Mitte - probably one of the most likely places to come up with such a concept given the reputation of Berlin as one of the world capitals of recreational excesses. Right after agreeing on form and subject of the book I moved to New York and my co-author Ingo Niermann climbed Mount Kilimandjaro. The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends was written between Kathmandu, Damascus, Fire Island and San Francisco. This required a lot of e-mailing and a few bouts of jetlag. But even our friendship endured.

Is this a confessional book?

Not really. Even our generous advance would not have been sufficient to try all the substances mentioned in our book.

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Adriano Sack and Ingo Niermann are our guest bloggers during the week of September 29th. If you have any questions for them, add a comment to any of their posts. Here is some more information about The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends: A Very Trippy Miscellany:

“Curiouser and curiouser” —fun and fascinating facts from the world of drugs.

Following in the tradition of The Ultimate Book of Useless Information, The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends is a wry potpourri of interesting information about every conceivable kind of drug. Readers can feed their heads with anecdotes, facts, lists, statistics, and illustrations, including:

• The test results of animals on LSD—cats lose their fear of dogs, and goats walk in geometric patterns
• Drugs found in nature, from magic mushrooms to St. John’s wort to beaver secretions
• Celebrities who overdosed at age 27—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, and Jean Michel-Basquiat
• Imaginary drugs in literature and film, from spice the mélange in Dune to Moloko plus in A Clockwork Orange
• Nicknames for a joint—from doobie to giggly stick to Mr. Boom Bizzle
• The global percentages of adults who have used cannabis—.004 percent in Singapore and 12.6 percent in the United States
• The uses of opium in ancient Rome—from treatments for insomnia and epilepsy to colic and deafness
• The most glamorous rehab clinics and their celebrity alumni
• Mini-biographies of the biggest drug kingpins around the world

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One of the best parts of becoming a published author is getting to stalk your book.

I learned about book-stalking from the website of my friend Pamela Ribon, an excellent online diarist and novelist who also writes on Samantha Who? Several years ago, after publishing her first novel, Why Girls Are Weird, Pam wrote about visiting bookstores, finding copies of her book, and bringing them to a store employee so she could offer to sign them. I thought, "Man, when I get a book published, I'm totally going to do that." And then I did. In the meantime, of course, I had to settle for stalking Pam's book. Oddly, nobody ever seemed to want me to sign them.

So far I've visited a couple of Barnes & Nobles here in Minnesota and at The Grove in Los Angeles, as well as a couple of Borders in L.A. What surprises me is that nobody ever seems to doubt that I'm actually the author of this book. There isn't an author photo on the cover, but I haven't been asked once for identification (although there was an awkward moment in the store on Sunset and Vine when the cashier initially thought I had just brought the copies of my book from home and wanted to stick them on their shelves). Apparently I could have been doing this all along, picking out books at random from the shelves and claiming to have written them. It probably would have worked as long as the real author wasn't a celebrity, a woman, dead, or someone with a name that indicated an ethnicity clearly different from my own. In other words, if you've got a signed copy of Benazir Bhutto's book, you can rest assured I had nothing to do with it.

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The trouble with writing a book about TV is that it starts to become slightly more out of date by the time the next season begins. I became aware of this phenomenon during the writing process, when I began writing during the 2006-2007 season, finishing the first draft during the 2007 summer hiatus, and doing revisions and proofing during the 2007-2008 season for a book that we would be publishing and marketing in summer of 2008. And I can only blame myself for forgetting to ask the networks for screener DVDs of its pilots for the next few years.

Fortunately, after watching a few of this year's new shows (okay, lots of commercials for new shows) and scanning the Entertainment Weekly fall TV preview issue, I think I can glean a few lessons. Feel free to print this out and tape it into your copy of A TV Guide to Life. If you do not yet own a copy of A TV Guide to Life, please shut your computer off and go get one now to avoid a blue screen of death.

From the new Christian Slater series, My Own Worst Enemy, along with last season's Chuck, we can learn that it's possible to partition a human brain like a computer hard drive. And the results will be equally glitchy. For guys, it means allowing a seeming everyman to move in rarefied spy circles. For women, it just means a more complicated relationship with their past, a la Samantha Who? and this season's The Ex-List.

» Michael Dowd discusses his book about evolution theology.

» Listen to other Penguin Podcasts.

Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution, religion, evolution, science, evolution theology, Penguin, books, author, reading, passage

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Penguin Group (USA) Publishes Two of the Six Books on the Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlist

Two books from Penguin Group (USA) have been selected for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist: Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (Riverhead) and Ceridwen Dovey’s Blood Kin (Viking). They are two of just three of the debut authors shortlisted for the honor.

The Dylan Thomas Prize, which is sponsored by the University of Wales, is designed to encourage creative talent in writers under the age of 30, and was established to honor the internationally esteemed work of Dylan Thomas, whose first book of poetry was published when he was 21. It is a global award, open to any work, from any genre, which has been published in the English language. With a £60,000 prize, it is one of the highest paying and prestigious literary awards.

The six writers, who are all under 30, were selected from a 16-strong long list unveiled in July, which was described by the Prize founder, Professor Peter Stead, as "one of the strongest (longlists) ever seen amongst any international literary prize." The 16 books covered a broad range of issues, including relationships, religion, racial prejudice and bereavement. Here’s what the judges had to say about Blood Kin and The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears:

Kurt Heinzelman, American poet and academic, said:

"Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey is ominously titled but the narrative is deft, even understated, in its depiction of power struggles that are political, sexual, and familial. The narrative itself is multi-voiced, intricately layered, and unflinching."

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Still, since there doesn't seem to be any other one reliable way to "become a writer" -- beyond simply by writing, that is -- people tend to ask writers how they managed it. The answer isn't always encouraging to the aspiring scribbler, as it generally includes the difficult-to-fake elements of years of hard work and frustration combined with one or two bucketfuls of luck. Alas, I am no exception. I spent years flailing around hopelessly, rarely earning anything for stringing sentences together, until one day I was invited over to Garrison Keillor's house. So in my case, it was more like a swimming pool of luck.

I'd been told I had a way with written words since grade school, but it wasn't until my early twenties that I started my first novel, largely at the encouragement of my wife. I worked on the book for several years and through a number of life changes, got it as good as I could get it, shopped it around to some agents, and finally landed one. Eventually that agency went under, and I gave up on the book for a while.

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In my early twenties, my plan for finding success in the publishing world was simple: write a book, get it published, go on all the talk shows, be hailed as a literary wunderkind, get rich and famous, quit my job. Unfortunately I ran into a little wrinkle after completing the first step, and even when I completed the second step years later, the tiny little online publishing site I ended up with didn't exactly have the pull to make any of the rest of the steps happen. Or even to ensure its own survival for the remainder of that fiscal year.

Looking back, it's probably just as well that my first time being published by a big house like Penguin didn't happen until I was in my thirties. I knew enough not to expect my first non-fiction book, A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know from Watching Television to make me instantly, fabulously, or even independently wealthy. And thus far, I have not been disappointed. And of course I haven't been on all the talk shows. So far I've only been on a few.

Two of my TV appearances have been on local network affiliates, on the kind of community-oriented show with a couple of genial hosts sitting on a living-room type set, chatting with folks like...well, me. Okay, one of the shows also had four kids ages two to five, a singing cowboy, and a guy dressed up like Teddy Roosevelt, but fortunately that show had a pretty big green room.

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Jeff Alexander is our guest blogger during the week of September 22nd. If you have any questions for Jeff Alexander, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television:

A couch potato’s book of wisdom— 100% commercial free!

Some say that entire generations of Americans are being raised by the television…like that’s a bad thing. Not so, says author Jeff Alexander, long-time television writer, advocate of education by television, and recapper for the popular website Television Without Pity. Here, he offers the ultimate in life lessons as seen on TV. Topics include:

• Saved by the Bell: School on TV

• Somebody Save Me: Super Powers and Magic Spells

• Tell Me Why I Love You Like I Do: Relationships on TV

• Making A Living: The Workplace

• And more