Jerry Curl

[ Editor’s note ] I finally finished Patti LuPone’s memoir this week. I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me a whole summer to do so, but whatta ride it was! I thoroughly enjoy biographies and Ms. LuPone’s extraordinary life made for an excellent read. For the unfortunate few who may not know who she is, Patti LuPone is the award-winning actress of stage and screen who famously originated the role of Eva Perón in Broadway’s Evita . She was also Fantine in the original London cast of Les Misérables , Mrs. Lovett in the 2006 Sweeney Todd revival, and (my personal favorite!) Mama Rose in the 2008 Arthur Laurents-directed revival of Gypsy . She is, to put it simply, a living legend. Having been in show business for over four decades, Ms. Lupone’s memoir is a veritable tell-all account of a career replete with soaring highs and devastating lows. She discusses the challenges of being a student actress at Julliard and the hardships of being a working actress on the road. S...

The AP reports : Cyndi Lauper says her book will show her true colors. The award-winning performer has a memoir coming out this fall, Atria Books announced Monday. Cyndi Lauper will cover the singer's story from her troubled childhood to superstardom in the 1980s to the "ups and downs" that followed. In a statement issued by Atria, the 58-year-old Lauper said: "Sometimes I come off good, sometimes not so good." Lauper's hits include "True Colors," "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "Time After Time." --> In Lauper-related news: A pal of mine gave me the DVD of her Memphis show a few months ago and I can report that it's pretty terrific. I don't think it got a lot of buzz because it's not what she's used to doing. It's called To Memphis With Love and it's Cyndi as we've never seen her. Turns out, her slightly raspy voice is perfectly suited for the blues and that's exactly what she does here. T...

The Marquee Blog reports : When J.K. Rowling announced that she was working on her first novel specifically geared toward adults , the demographic was about all fans had to go on. But now we have a few more details - and a title. Rowling's next book will be called The Casual Vacancy , publisher Little, Brown has announced. A book description on the publisher's site reveals that The Casual Vacancy will center on a town named Pagford, a seeming "English idyll" that's thrown into shock after the unexpected death of 40-something Barry Fairweather. The description presents Pagford as "a little town" that is not as calm as it might seem on the surface. Behind the "pretty facade is a town at war...Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils." So when Fairweather's passing leaves a vacancy on the parish council, that "empty seat...becomes the catalyst for the ...

The Huffington Post reports : Fewer people are reading - but those that do are reading more and in more formats than ever. According to the results of a series of telephone surveys carried out by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project , funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which were published yesterday. The report showed that as of February 2012, 21% of Americans had read an e-book, and that owners of e-readers read an average of eight books a year more than people without the devices (24 vs 16). The surveys of 2,986 respondents, carried out in English and Spanish at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, also showed that the average (calculated by mean) American reads 17 books a year. However, 19% of respondents aged 16 and over said that they hadn't read a single book in any format, over the previous 12 months - the highest since such surveys on American reading habits began in 1978. If this figure is accurate, that means more than 5...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy Clint Hill, Jackie Kennedy’s former secret service agent, breaks his silence with a new memoir, Mrs. Kennedy and Me , and talks to Savannah Guthrie about his experiences in Camelot.

True Blood is returning this summer on HBO, so here's something for the kick-off party. If you're looking to feed the humans, shifters or witches in your group, you're in luck. HBO is releasing the True Blood Cookbook . Sure the fairies eat lumiere fruit and the vamps drink True Blood (and people), but were-panthers and humans need something a little more substantial. If the food served at Merlotte's makes your tummy growl like a wolf when you watch the show, you can pre-order it now. The book is official and full of full page pictures. It ships on August 29th. No official date has been given for the show's premiere.

MSN reports : The next secret ingredient on the Food Network? The e-book version of Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes is now available , ending the refractory period on cooking with sperm. Although the experimental repasts, including Hollandaise sauce flan, may not offer any real health benefits, sperm could prove a smart staple in a faltering economy. As the Lulu description indicates, it's "inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, restaurants and homes." Not everyone is impressed with the gastronomical gimmick. One Lulu reviewer complains "it takes a lot of balls (so to speak) to publish a book like this," bemoaning that the main ingredient seems to be added in as an "afterthought." In related news: With a population of just 5.5 million people, Denmark has far greater reserves of deposited sperm than it can use at home. Now the country is trading on its reputation for Nordic good looks and healthy l...

Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars has landed at an online retailer near you. You can read all about Scotty Bowers and the bombshell-dropping book here .

Books and the curative powers of storytelling are celebrated in the moving animated short from Moonbot Studios which won the Oscar this year. Open Culture adds : The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore offers a modern tribute to an old world. Made with an animation style that blends stop motion with computer animation and traditional hand-drawing, the silent film pays homage to a bygone era when elegantly printed books inhabited our world. (Via Towleroad )

CNN reports : The Berenstain Bears ' co-creator Jan Berenstain has died at the age of 88, according to a Facebook page dedicated to the furry characters Berenstain and her husband created. "It is with very sad hearts we inform you that our dear Jan died on Friday, February 24. We are grateful for all of your very kind thoughts. Please remember her family at this very difficult time," said a statement on the Berenstain Bears Facebook page. Berenstain and her husband, Stan, were already successful cartoonists when they decided to transition to writing children's books. According to publisher Harper Collins, The Big Honey Hunt , published in 1962, was the first book starring the bear family. Since that time, more than 330 Berenstain Bears books have been published over the past 50 years, the publisher said. More than 260 million copies have been sold, making it one of the best-selling children's book series in history. The Berenstain Bears stories were so popular...

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling reached all ages with her books about "the boy who lived," but her next work will be specifically for adults, publisher Little, Brown said yesterday. This will be Rowling's first adult novel, but other than that, little is known about her new effort. The publisher says more information about the title, story and release date are to come later this year. Rowling, who started an international phenomenon with her seven-book Harry Potter series, said in a statement that her new work of fiction will definitely be a departure from Harry and his Hogwarts crew. "Although I've enjoyed writing it every bit as much, my next book will be very different to the 'Harry Potter' series, which has been published so brilliantly by Bloomsbury and my other publishers around the world," Rowling said in a statement. "The freedom to explore new territory is a gift that Harry's success has brought me, and with that new territory it...

ArtsBeat reports : Before his death in 2003 at age 99, Al Hirschfeld captured more than 7,000 personalities from Broadway and beyond in his signature swooping lines. Now, after drawing everyone from John Barrymore to the Muppets, he will be getting his own full-dress portrait. Last week, Sarah Crichton Books at Farrar, Straus and Giroux signed up a biography of the artist by Ellen Stern, who wrote a profile of Mr. Hirschfeld for GQ in 1987. While Ms. Stern never saw him again after the article appeared, her future role may have been foreordained when Mr. Hirschfeld signed a copy of his book “Show Business Is No Business” to her with the words “For Ellen Stern, my biographer.” “The piece ran, he liked it a lot, and that was that,” Ms. Stern said in an e-mail. “Alas, I never saw him again. But I held onto my notes. He died in 2003, and last year his house was sold and his famous barber chair and drawing board given to the New York Public Library. It broke my heart. Hirschfeld would ha...

Book Buzz reports : In 1988, Golden Age film star Debbie Reynolds wrote her autobiography, Debbie: My Life , about finding love with her third husband, the "brave, loyal and loving" Richard Hamlett. Oh, how things have changed. One mistress scandal and divorce later, the Unsinkable Molly Brown star, 79, is taking another approach in a new memoir, Unsinkable , to be published in 2013 by William Morrow. "I can't believe how naïve I was when I wrote it. In this book, I look back at the years since then and revisit stories I could not fully tell at the time," she said in a statement. The new tell-all will cover everything from the end of her marriage to Hamlett (along with taking a mistress, he embezzled proceeds from her business, leaving her "emotionally and financially bankrupt" after the divorce), to the catastrophic endings to her two previous marriages (to Eddie Fisher, who left her for Elizabeth Taylor in 1959, and to Harry Karl, who lost their for...

Brooks Barnes writes for The New York Times : Straight actors who wanted to pay for sex in the 1990s had Heidi Fleiss. Gay ones during the late 1940s and beyond apparently had Scotty Bowers. His story has floated through moviedom’s clubby senior ranks for years: Back in a more golden age of Hollywood, a guy named Scotty, a former Marine, was said to have run a type of prostitution ring for gay and bisexual men in the film industry, including A-listers like Cary Grant, George Cukor and Rock Hudson, and even arranged sexual liaisons for actresses like Vivien Leigh and Katharine Hepburn. Now, he’s talking. Mr. Bowers, 88, recalls his highly unorthodox life in a ribald memoir scheduled to be published by Grove Press on Feb. 14, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars . Written with Lionel Friedberg, an award-winning producer of documentaries, it is a lurid, no-detail-too-excruciating account of a sexual Zelig who (if you believe him) trawled an X-rate...

Fans of Bravo's Andy Cohen will not be surprised to learn that in high school he was voted "most talkative and biggest gossip." So the title of his new memoir – really a book of stories from his life, he says – is a no-brainer: Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture . Cohen, the chatty host of Watch What Happens: Live and various Bravo reality reunion shows, gave a very funny dramatic reading from his new book at a promotional lunch in New York Wednesday. Most Talkative is due from Henry Holt on May 8. He read excerpts that included a childhood car trip from hell (as far as his relatives were concerned, since he didn't shut up for 48 straight hours) and the time a few little lies got in him in hot water with his idol Oprah Winfrey. Cohen, who grew up gay and loving TV, says his book "begins and ends with Susan Lucci." And he covers his days as a "Jewish go-go dancer," and of course, The Real Housewives franchise. It's as...

Book Buzz reports : For the second consecutive year, Washington, D.C. has ranked as the most literate city in the country, according to an annual statistical survey to be released today. Ranked by Central Connecticut State University President Jack Miller and based on data from number of bookstores, library resources, newspaper circulation and Internet resources, the top 10 for 2011 are as follows: 1. Washington, D.C. (same as in 2010) 2. Seattle (same as in 2010) 3. Minneapolis (same as in 2010) 4. Atlanta (same as in 2010) 5. Boston (up from No. 12 in 2010) 6. Pittsburgh (down from No. 5 in 2010) 7. Cincinnati (up from No. 11 in 2010) 8. St. Louis (up from No 9.5 in 2010) 9. San Francisco (down from No. 6 in 2010) 10. Denver (down from No. 8 in 2010) Miller says he discovered that "wealthier cites are no more likely to rank highly in literacy than poorer cities." For example, he notes that Cleveland is ranking second lowest for median family income, data, but based on highe...

Here's a delightful stop-motion video made by a Toronto couple who love books. They write : We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto. Everything you see here can be purchased at Type Books. Grayson Matthews generously composed the beautiful, custom music. But none of it could have been done without all the volunteer hands who shelved and reshelved books all night, every night. (Via Towleroad )

[ Editor's note ] As previously reported , I had the pleasure of meeting Patti Smith yesterday. She was at Books & Books in Coral Gables signing copies of her newest memoir, Woolgathering . Our encounter was brief but memorable. She was very gracious and humored my star-struck fandom for her work. She gave me some words of encouragement on the writing front and I made her chuckle with a lame joke. Despite my profuse sweating, I think it was a success. In Woolgathering , Smith revisits the most sacred experiences of her early years, with truths so vivid they border on the surreal. The author entwines her childhood self—and its "clear, unspeakable joy"—with memories both real and envisioned from her twenties on New York's MacDougal Street, the street of cafés. Woolgathering was completed, in Michigan, on Patti Smith's 45th birthday and originally published in a slim volume from Raymond Foye's Hanuman Books. Twenty years later, New Directions is proud to pr...

In super exciting news: Patti Smith will be at Books & Books in Coral Gables this Sunday ! On tour for the reissue of her poetry book, Woolgathering , Smith will autograph copies at Miami's favorite independent bookstore. Miami is no doubt still a bit high on love for Patti Smith. The rock-n-roll poetess appeared at the 2010 Miami International Book Fair just days after her memoir, Just Kids, won the National Book Award. (See the video here ). Woolgathering , which the L.A Times calls a "collection of impressionistic prose poems that dances at the edge of memoir before opting for something harder to pin down," was originally published in 1992 when Smith was 45. Twenty years later, it's being republished with additional writing, photos, and illustrations. At a mere 80 pages, it's Smith's musing on her childhood and becoming an artist. Chat up Smith at the 4 p.m. autographing on Sunday and pick up a copy of Woolgathering . It's a book for the avid Smith...

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