(View entire post here)

David Farley is our guest blogger during the week of July 13th If you have any questions for David Farley, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on An Irreverent Curiosity:

A tour through the centuries and through a bizarre Italian town in search of an unbelievable relic: the foreskin of Jesus Christ

In December 1983, a priest in the Italian hill town of Calcata shared shocking news with his congregation: The pride of their town, the foreskin of Jesus, had been stolen. Some postulated that it had been stolen by Satanists. Some said the priest himself was to blame. Some even pointed their fingers at the Vatican. In 2006, travel writer David Farley moved to Calcata, determined to find the missing foreskin, or at least find out the truth behind its disappearance. Farley recounts how the relic passed from Charlemagne to the papacy to a marauding sixteenth-century German solider before finally ending up in Calcata, where miracles occurred that made the sleepy town a major pilgrimage destination. Over the centuries, as Catholic theology evolved, the relic came to be viewed as something of an embarrassment, culminating in a 1900 Church decree that allowed the parish to display it only on New Year's Day.

An Irreverent Curiosity interweaves this history with the curious landscape of Calcata, a beautiful and untouched medieval village set atop four-hundred-fifty-foot cliffs, which now, due to the inscrutable machinations of Italian bureaucracy, is a veritable counterculture coven. Blending history, travel, and perhaps the oddest story in Christian lore, An Irreverent Curiosity is a weird and wonderful tale of conspiracy and misadventure. 

(View entire post here)

Craig Nelson is our guest blogger during the week of July 13th If you have any questions for Craig Nelson, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on Rocket Men:

A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of the greatest achievements of humankind

At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the last frontier of human imagination: the moon.

Rocket Men is the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the mystery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar for most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represented in planning, technology, and execution.

Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vivid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quotidian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right into the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control.

Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, faith, science, and wonder that changed the course of history.

Penguin Books Online Digest, 7/6 - 7/10, 2009

AUTHOR Q&A

AUTHOR Q&A It Feels So Good When I Stop Joe Pernice (Riverhead)

EXCERPT 

EXCERPT Treason's Shore Sherwood Smith (DAW)

EXCERPT It Feels So Good When I Stop Joe Pernice (Riverhead)

EXCERPT The Real Wizard of Oz Rebecca Loncraine (Gotham Books)

EXCERPT A Question of Freedom R. Dwayne Betts (Gotham Books)

EXCERPT Voices from the Moon Andrew Chaikin (Studio)

FEATURE 

FEATURE Public Enemies Bryan Burrough (Penguin)

FEATURE An Irreverent Curiosity David Farley (Gotham)

READING GROUP GUIDE

RGG Glover's Mistake Nick Laird (Viking)

RGG Creator's Map Emilio Calderon (Penguin)

RGG Short Girls Bich Minh Nguyen (Viking)

RGG The End Salvatore Scibona (Riverhead)

RGG All the Sad Young Literary Men Keith Gessen (Penguin)

VIDEO 

VIDEO What's the Worst That Could Happen? Greg Craven (Perigee)

(View entire post here)

Time flies so fast these days. I've so enjoyed hanging out with you this week. I thought you might enjoy this interview I did with Alex Caruthers, who is the star of Dragons Prefer Blondes. Actually, she's sort of insisting on it. So here we go:

1. So Alex, I understand you Caruthers sisters are pretty special? Could you explain for those not "in the know" what a guardian is and how many of you are there? Well, it's kind of a secret, but since you promised to keep this to yourself and you know we'll have to kill you if you leak it out, I guess it's okay to share. (I'm kidding of course. Sort of...) My sisters, Gillian, Mira, Claire, and myself, are Guardian Keys. We keep beings from other worlds, from causing harm on Earth. I'm in charge of keeping the dragons at bay. It's a dirty, disgusting job, but someone has to do it. Of course, everyone on Earth thinks I'm some club-owning socialite. If they only knew...

2. It must be pretty exciting to have your own story, and I love the title, Dragons Prefer Blondes.  Tell us about that.  Did you get to give any input say, in the title or cover, or the actual writing or was this all Candace? Our editor, Anne Sowards at Berkley, came up with that title. She's quite brilliant that one. She kept Candace from trying to take over my story, and allowed me to tell it in my own words, which was very important to me. I wanted people to know the struggles of a Guardian Key. I will say that once I had her under control, Candace was quite good at helping me to dig deep and talk about the things that really mattered. Oh, and the title is a little inside joke about my hair color. When you read the book, or if you read my sister Gillian's book, The Demon King and I, you'll see what I mean.