Southern Vampires

According to PW, Alan Ball, the creator of HBO's Six Feet Under, plans to shoot a TV pilot based on Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire series later this year!

The latest book in the series, Definitely Dead, is due out May 2.

Publisher Faves

Publishers at PLA raved about these new and forthcoming fiction books:

HarperCollins
Savannah Breeze by Mary Kay Andrews
The Girl from Charnelle by Kevin L. Cook
Full of Grace by Dorothea Benton Frank
Coronado by Dennis LeHane
No Good Deeds by Laura Lippman
Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund

Holtzbrinck
No Nest for the Wicked by Donna Andrews
Sequence by Lori Andrews
King of Lies by John Hart
The Darkest Place by D. Daniel Judson
Cold Kill by David Lawrence
Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn by Sarah Miller
Still Life by Louise Penning
Highly Effective Detective by Richard Yancey

Time Warner
The Girls by Lori Lansens (Spielberg has bought the movie rights.)
How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan

Sand Cafe

For anyone who found Jarhead (the movie or the non-fiction book) interesting, here's a new fiction book out next month:

The Sand Cafe by Neil MacFarquhar
A fierce, funny debut novel of journalists at war--or waiting for one that never quite arrives--based on the Gulf War experiences of a renowned New York Times correspondent

Fashionable Fiction

I watched the season finale of Project Runway last night and was inspired to make a list of new and forthcoming "Fashionable Fiction." I also just want to note that I'm sad that local boy Daniel didn't win, but really Chloe's collection was better.

Some Like it Haute by Julie K. L. Dam
Humiliated by a social faux pas at a haute couture show in Paris, Alexandra Simons, an American fashion correspondent for a popular weekly magazine, attends a trendy avant-garde show and finds a potential love interest in a successful new designer, but fears he is hiding something from her.



Fashionably Late by Beth Kendrick
The youngest of four sisters, Becca Davis has always felt overshadowed by her strong-willed siblings and has always played it safe in her life, until she surprises everyone by taking a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to become a fashion designer in Los Angeles.



Goodbye, Jimmy Choo by Annie Sanders
Thrown together in their new English countryside homes by their husbands' respective careers, Izzie, a bohemian free-spirit, and Maddi, a Gucci-clad socialite, become unlikely fast friends in their shared longing for the London they left behind.




The Manolo Matrix by Julie Kenner
Searching for Mr. Right as well as the perfect pair of designer shoes, aspiring actress Jennifer Martin finds herself playing bodyguard when a would-be assassin forces her to participate in a life-or-death scavenger hunt.




Paris Hangover by Kirsten Lobe
Leaving a failed relationship with a live-in lover, a career in fashion, and New York behind, Klein is determined to start over in Paris and plunges into the idiosyncratic world of French men and dating, muddling her way through sexy Renaud, three men named Jean, and a married man who wants her to become his mistress. A first novel.


Elements of Style by Wendy Wasserstein
A dazzling mosaic of madcap social whirls, fashion, style, and mores captures the lives of New York City's urban upper crust as they make their way through twenty-first-century Manhattan in a post-9/11 world, in a comedic debut novel by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of The Heidi Chronicles.



The Booster by Jennifer Solow
A Manhattan kleptomaniac remembers her childhood spent in her uncle's high-fashion Madison Avenue department store, where she lived a fairy-tale existence before suffering a devastating loss that led to her termination from her advertising job and recruitment into an organized South American shoplifting ring.

Indian Fiction

Because Newsweek just had an interesting article on India and because I enjoy Indian movies and fiction I just wanted to point out some recent fiction books by Indian-Americans that are being made into movies.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
I'm sure many of you are well aware of this Pulitzer award winning author, but you may not have been aware that a movie based on this book will be released later this year.




How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan
Written by a Harvard sophomore with a huge first printing, this is in development with Dreamworks.

Jane Austen

Even more new Jane Austen related fiction!

Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or, Love, Death, and the SATs by Paula Marantz Cohen
In a tale inspired by Jane Austen's Persuasion, dedicated guidance counselor Anne Ehrlich works to help her high school charges through the perils of their college admissions and remembers a past love whose nephew requires her assistance.



North by Northanger, or the Shades of Pemberley: A Mr. & Mrs. Darcy Mystery by Carrie Bebris
Awaiting the birth of their first child, Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy find their situation compromised by challenges to the family fortune, the arrival of Darcy's imperial-minded aunt, and the discovery of a family heirloom that holds the key to a secret conspiracy.