Judge a Book by Its Cover

Margaret Atwood is an awesome writer; it turns out she’s also a pretty nifty tweeter. The Canadian is probably best known in the U.S. for 1985′s The Handmaid’s Tale (subsequently made into a dreadful movie), though she’s penned 13 novels, 17 poetry collections, children’s books, et cetera. (My personal favorite is the poem “You fit into me/ like a hook into an eye/ A fish hook/ An open eye.”) As if that’s not enough to keep her busy, now she’s designing superhero costumes on Twitter.

Also Twitter-worthy is Kathe Koja‘s new novel Under the Poppy, due out in hardback on November 9. In an era when even the best books often look Photoshopped by colorblind monkeys, this book is a triple threat: the cover art is beautiful; the author and her friends created an imaginative, entertaining, and slightly risqué shadow-puppet play for the video trailer which simply must be seen and adored by everyone; and the story itself is wickedly engrossing, once you get past the rather stylized first few paragraphs. Read an excerpt. And really, do watch the trailer, it’s well worth the minute on its own merits.

In non-Twitter electron news, eBook fans are getting whiplash these days, as the platform wars wage on. Last Friday, October 22, Amazon announced they are loosening the reins on the Kindle. Periodicals will be free through Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, i-cetera, and soon Kindle will allow lending (aka file-sharing). Sort of. The press release states: “Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable–this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.”

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Barnes & Noble recently announced that the Nook will be available at Wal-Mart, and on Tuesday, October 25, B&N unveiled Nook Kids, a digital library of eBooks for children. News of a “special mystery announcement,” widely believed to be the introduction of a Nook with a color screen, also hit the web on Tuesday. B&N confirmed Wednesday, October 26, during a live press conference, that the speculators were right. The new Nook Color will also have social networking capability. Expect another announcement from Amazon within days, followed by a press release from B&N, followed by….

Life imitating art, or vice versa: Facebook game maker Zynga has filed a patent application for virtual currency. You may have thought Cory Doctorow’s For the Win was fiction, but no, the author was in fact staring down the barrel of the near-future, and now it’s here. Right here, right now, as a matter of fact: clickety-click to read the patent application for yourself.

Is Anne Rice looking for some non-virtual currency? The kooky doyenne of vampiria is offering up 7,000 books from her personal library through Oregon retailer Powell’s Books. Powell’s notes that books for sale may have been “signed or annotated by Ms. Rice,” coded speech for “marked the shit out of ‘em.” Which is great for book collectors, so hie thee over before everything good is gone.

And finally, mystery fans should be thrilled that website Stop, You’re Killing Me! has published a list of all the mystery novels that have won awards in the last 50 years.  From the Agatha‘s to the Shamus Awards, the index includes some of the best of the genre. Reading through it could take another half century.