Books/Publishing News

1. "Tribute" by Nora Roberts (Putnam)

Key: F-Fiction; NF-Nonfiction; H-Hardcover; P-Paperback

1. "Eclipse" by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown)

NEW YORK - With the market for electronic books still relatively sleepy, Sony Corp. is trying a new tack: untethering the latest model of its e-book reading device from its own online bookstore.

"My Sister, My Love" (Ecco. 562 pages. $25.95), by Joyce Carol Oates: Some of Oates' books feel as if she wrote them as dares to herself. This novel, her 37th, is one of the wildest.

"When the Guillotine Fell" (St. Martin's Press. 256 pages. $24.95), by Jeremy Mercer: It may come as a surprise to some that France routinely used the guillotine as its official method of capital punishment until 1977, when Hamida Djandoubi became the last man guillotined in the port town of Marseilles.

NEW YORK - The "Iron Man" will not be wielding a pen: Robert Downey Jr. has postponed plans to write a memoir and has returned his advance to publisher HarperCollins, a spokeswoman for the actor told The Associated Press.

KEY WEST, Fla. - A white-bearded Florida man won an Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest, a highlight of a festival that ended Sunday honoring the late Nobel Prize-winning author.

Los Angeles (E! Online) - Being incarcerated may be a pretty good excuse, but Simon & Schuster apparently doesn't care what led to Lil Kim and Foxy Brown's writers block.

"85 Years of Great Writing in Time" (Time Books, 560 pages, $26.95): Those of us who traffic in words for a living feel somewhat under siege these days, like a Donkey Kong machine sitting forlornly in the corner of a ramshackle pizza parlor while teenagers on the sidewalk outside play Grand Theft Auto on their handhelds.

ATLANTA - Best selling writer E. Lynn Harris can still remember the first time he realized he was poor.

NEW YORK - It's only 9:33 a.m., but already Danielle Steel is having a lousy morning.

NEW YORK - An uncut edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle," a highly praised and controversial novel published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is finally coming out in English.

INDIANAPOLIS - A janitor whom a university official had accused of racial harassment for reading a historical book about the Ku Klux Klan on his break has gotten an apology — months later — from the school.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Madonna's brother Christopher Ciccone says the singer would "do her best to maintain" her marriage to British director Guy Ritchie and that he doubts she had an affair with Yankee baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

NEW YORK - Larry King is ready to tell his story.

NEW YORK - Basketball great Bill Russell is working on a memoir about his friendship with the late Red Auerbach, the Boston Celtics coach for whom Russell starred on a long run of championship teams.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Does the Tel Aviv apartment of a lately deceased centenarian hold a trove of moldering manuscripts that could rewrite our understanding of Franz Kafka?

"Chasing Darkness" (Simon & Schuster. 273 pages. $25.95), by Robert Crais: Little in life is as satisfying as a new Elvis Cole novel. Each installment of Robert Crais' 20-year-old series is like meeting a good friend for lunch who you haven't seen in a long time.

"Killer View" (G.P. Putnam's Sons. 340 pages. $24.95), by Ridley Pearson: Only Ridley Pearson could take a timeless children's tale and deftly turn it into a series of engaging thrillers.

"Captain America: The Chosen" (Marvel Comics. 168 Pages. $24.99), by David Morrell and Mitch Breitweiser: David Morrell has done something totally new: The best selling author of action thrillers has written a comic-book series. It all happened because a Marvel Comics editor suggested that Morrell, who created the famous character "Rambo" in his novel, "First Blood," would make a good pairing with another military icon, Captain America.

NEW YORK - A memoir by Madonna's brother says the singer really does love her husband, director Guy Ritchie, but, apparently, not as much as she loves her career and herself.

On the first Saturday in August, at midnight, Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, Ga., will be decorated in black and red. Prizes will be handed out and special cookies — some with a filling the color of blood, will be served.

LONDON - Salman Rushdie is probably the Booker Prize's best-known winner. Now he is officially the best.

LONDON (Reuters) - British author Salman Rushdie won the "Best of the Booker" prize on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of one of the world's most prestigious literary awards.

NEW YORK (Billboard) - When author Neil Strauss first met Motley Crue, the scene could have been ripped right from "The Dirt," the 2001 band autobiography he co-wrote with the group that became a New York Times best seller.

"Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of My Hypochondria" (Riverhead Books. 256 pages. $23.95), by Jennifer Traig: In our current age of anxiety, medical-themed TV shows and WebMD, most of us — at one time or another — have inflated a pimple into cancer or a stomachache into appendicitis.

"The Book of Love: The Story of the Kama Sutra" (Henry Holt and Co. 272 pages. $27.50), by James McConnachie: There's something almost magical about the words "Kama Sutra." They conjure up images of hidden passion, of mystical eroticism, of countless lovemaking positions that are impossibly acrobatic.

OAKLAND, Calif. - Pick up David Sedaris' new book and you're staring at death. If the van Gogh painting of a skeleton gracing the cover doesn't say it clearly enough, the fact that the skull is smoking a cigarette should.