The character played by Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's classic film was partly based on a gossip columnist now writing his own account of Rome's scandalous 1950s

When the gossip columnist Victor Ciuffa emerged blinking from a private viewing of La Dolce Vita in Rome in February 1960, he had one thought in his mind: the film he had just watched amounted to his life played out on the screen.

Federico Fellini's classic depiction of decadent American starlets and persistent photographers changed ­cinema forever. Now the journalist who chronicled 1950s life on Rome's glitzy Via Veneto and briefed Fellini for his film has decided to give his own definitive account of the era. As far as Ciuffa, now 77, is concerned, 50 years later he is setting the record straight, by writing La Dolce Vita, Minute by Minute.

"The real Dolce Vita started in Rome years before the cafés opened on Via Veneto and had as much to do with mys­terious deaths, drug abuse and debauched Roman aristocrats as with ­Hollywood," he said. While photographers such as Tazio Secchiaroli have long been seen as inspirations for Paparazzo, the character in La Dolce Vita who gave...
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This handbook, promising to reverse all conventional thinking on parenting, took the US by storm. Viv Groskop is less than impressed

This book has been hailed as "a wake-up call for parents" and "the Freakonomics of child-rearing". It caused a storm in the US, where it was on the New York Times bestseller list for two months. The authors, journalists Ashley Merryman and Po Bronson (the latter wrote the self-help book What Should I Do With My Life?), are currently crisscrossing the US on a 14-city tour. With such a build-up, I expected it to blow my maternal mind. Instead, I ended up wanting to burn it.

Nurtureshock started as a series of articles in Newsweek, aiming to reveal the new "science of parenting". (Yes, alarm bells are ringing already.) The premise? Everything we think we know about the right way to bring up children is wrong. "Many of modern society's strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring because key twists in the science have been overlooked." But guess what? The book's "shocking" claims will feel familiar to anyone who reads the papers. Get this. It's not...
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Nuit Blanche: Just a glance between two strangers. (4:41 minutes)

Garuda: An Indian boy and a mythical bird. So much beautiful design crammed into a minute’s worth of film—I wish every frame was a wall-sized painting. (1:16 minutes)

Nuit Blanche
Arev Manoukian

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

(And a “making of” video here.)

Garuda
Nicolas Athane, Meryl Franck, Alexis Liddell, Andres Salaff, Mailys Vallade

Garuda from Andres Salaff on Vimeo.

More animation in the Saturday Morning Cartoon Index.

Irene Gallo is the art director for Tor books and Tor.com.

In Chekhov, writes James Lasdun, literature seems to face us, “for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness our unfathomable strangeness.”
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Another great essay in the LRB: Tom McCarthy says French writers who’ve come of age in the past 30 years have had to grapple with the question, what do you do after the nouveau roman?
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Titus Awakes, written by Mervyn Peake's widow based on notes left by the author to complete the sequence, set for publication in 2011

Three weeks after it emerged that Mervyn Peake's wife had written a fourth book in her husband's acclaimed Gormenghast trilogy, Random House has seen off stiff competition from other publishers to acquire rights in the novel.

Peake died from Parkinson's in 1968, leaving behind a page-and-a-half of notes about his plans for Titus Awakes, a fourth book in his classic fantasy series. His wife, Maeve Gilmore, wrote the novel, but it had been hidden in a south London attic since she died in 1983. The couple's granddaughter, Christian, recently discovered it while the family was clearing out the loft.

Three publishers expressed interest in publishing the book, but Random House imprint Vintage Classics triumphed, paying a "significant" sum to acquire rights in Titus Awakes. The novel opens as the 77th Earl of Groan Titus leaves Gormenghast, and follows his search for a final home. Vintage will publish the book in July 2011, on the centenary of Peake's birth, when it will also release a new edition of the Gormenghast...
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After a week of speculation, the Macmillan and Amazon (AMZN) standoff has ended the way it began--with a New York Times article on a Friday evening after this GalleyCat editor had went home for the night. It appears that the online bookseller has restored the direct purchase buttons to books by the publisher. (UPDATED on Feb 6 at 11:23 a.m)

Here's an excerpt: "Details of the resolution have not been made public, but the restoration of Macmillan books to Amazon's site indicates a peaceful settlement was reached. 'I am delighted to be back in business with Amazon,' John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, said in an e-mail message."

Last week Amazon removed the direct sale buttons for the publisher's books, writing: "We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books." More than 2,000 comments have been posted alongside that controversial letter.

You can double check your favorite Macmillan book at Amazon, but we've noticed that Read more »

My newest column at the LA Times looks at a slew of newcomers, including Belinda Bauer, Randy Susan Meyers, Carla Buckley and James Thompson, whose first crime novels come at the dawn of a new decade (or the end of...
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The sun slid down the sky, leaving behind it a grand and flammable slickment of colour (or, to give the British spelling, coulououour) like unto that trailing a blood orange snail. Thence, scenting the breeze and finding an even-toed ungulate within it, the Canid of Enormous Malevolence decided to sup of its source. “Growl, indeed!” spake he. “Veritable threat, via glottal auditory!”

This week’s I Speak Fluent Giraffe is that cautionary tale with a hard, brick-like moral, Triage of Porks.

Check next Monday for our next installment. Remember, you can get this and all our other podcasts at Grand Master Podcast Feed.

Podcast copyright 2010, Tor.com. Story copyright 2010, Jason Henninger. Narrated and produced by Mur Lafferty.

There are four good places to start reading Anthony Price’s Audley series. They are with the first written volume, The Labyrinth Makers (1970) a thriller about British intelligence and the KGB struggling over the lost gold of Troy. Or you could start with the first chronologically, The Hour of the Donkey (1980), which is a war story about the events  leading up to Dunkirk. Or you could start with Soldier No More (1981), which is about a double-agent sent on a recruitment mission in 1956, and the Late Roman Empire. Or you could start with Other Paths to Glory (1974) which is another recruitment mission and the Great War. There are nineteen books in the series, but none of the others strikes me as a good way in. I started with Soldier No More when I was in university, when one of my tutors mentioned that it was a thriller featuring Galla Placida.

These books are not science fiction or fantasy, except for Tomorrow’s Ghost (1979), which is arguably fantasy. It’s from the point of view of a female agent who at least believes...
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As a fan of the Shrek books and movies, I was so excited when I heard that it was being made into a musical. Family friendly Broadway shows are one of the reasons that people return to the theatre again and again. A child’s first trip to see a show in Times Square is one that most will remember all of their lives.

As an adult, I was equally as happy to be able to see SHREK! The Musical on Broadway. It is a fun, high-energy show with a combination of laughs for kids and jokes for the rest of the audience. The fabulous cast (Brian D’Arcy James as Shrek and the Tony-Award winning Sutton Foster as Fiona) carried the story with amazing voices and hilarious musical comedy skills. An audience favorite was Lord Farquaad, played by Broadway veteran Chirstopher Sieber, who performed the entire show on his knees! Lord Farquaad is a short man who takes advantage of his power, and Mr. Seiber’s portrayal was so fun to watch. On knee pads with little fake legs attached to his own, he danced and hopped around the stage, even participating in a full-cast kick-line. The upbeat,...
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The arrival of the ebook will overturn existing models of economics and production

Anyone who has ever attended a literary festival will know the form. First the reading by one author or a discussion among several authors; then 15 minutes of questions from the audience; finally a few closing remarks from the moderator, ending with the important fact that Poet X or Historian Y, whom we've just had the great pleasure of hearing, will be signing books at the adjacent stall. For an author, this next stage can be either gladdening or humbling. There might be a queue of people with newly bought books in their hands or there might be nobody other than a woman who wants to raise "a few points" about your talk. Worse, much worse, is the sight of a long queue at the signing table – impossibly long, out of the door and round the block, you never knew you had so many readers! – which turns out to be for Michael Palin or Alan Titchmarsh, whose pens and smiles never rest.

Usually, the situation lies between those extremes. Half a dozen good people will bring a book to...
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