The PW Morning Report, July 17, 2008

By Dermot McEvoy -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2008 5:19:00 AM

Thursday, July 17, 2008

A daily round-up of the latest publishing news: Deal Hudson Redux; Kay Ryan New U.S. Poet Laureate; Greenwald on Friedman; Bertelsmann Confirms U.K. Book Club Sale; Danielle Steel and the Media; The Leopard’s Second Life; Female Eunuch Enraged; Gabriel García Márquez Screenplay; The Wizarding World of Harry Potter; and Kafkaesque Turn in Israel?

Salon.com: Catholic Group to McCain: Dump Deal Hudson
Deal Hudson is involved with the Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee. He’s a big friend of Karl Rove and President Bush. Back in 1994 he had a sexual encounter with an 18-year-old student when he was teaching at Fordham University in the Bronx. PW broke the story of how Hudson and Mary Matalin, publisher of Threshold, got together to publish Hudson’s new book, Onward Christian Soldiers, back in January

Kay Ryan Named U.S. Poet Laureate, reports New York Times
Ryan, 62, has won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald Does A Refresher Course on Tom (Suck-On-This) Friedman
As we await the publication of Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September, Greenwald reviews the New York Times columnist cheering-leading for the Iraq War

Bertelsmann Confirms U.K. Book Club Sale, reports The Bookseller
Bertelsmann CEO Hartmut Ostrowski said the company had entered "a sales process" to jettison BCA

Danielle Steel Ventures From Her Writer’s Garret and Is Not Amused, reports AP
Bestselling author would rather avoid the media and write: "Occasionally," she muses, "I have to stick my nose out the door. Otherwise, people are going to think I’m 100 years old and dead"

The Leopard’s Second Life
New York Times reports that Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic Italian novel is drawing renewed interest in a new Pantheon edition

Female Eunuch Author Enraged, reports UPI
Germaine Greer is incensed over a new London play, The Female of the Species, that just might be about her

Long-Lost Gabriel García Márquez Screenplay to be Filmed, reports The Guardian
Titled Frontera, the film was written before the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude

Universal Orlando to Unveil The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, reports UPI
Just in time for the recession!

Kafkaesque Turn in Israel?
Reuters says that the centenarian secretary of Kafka’s friend and biographer Max Brod just died and everyone is speculating what’s in the diaries and papers in her apartment

The PW Morning Report will return on Monday, July 21st