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Britain Honors Writer Bill Bryson
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Great Britain has bestowed a great honor on American writer Bill Bryson. Bryson was awarded an honorary Order of the British Empire, or OBE, from the government Wednesday.

Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said the award marks Bryson's contribution to literature. Bill Bryson is one of Britain's most popular and best-loved authors," she told the presentation ceremony in central London.

"Despite having been born and raised in the United States, he has become a true British institution. He has not only delighted the British public with his witty and insightful writing, but educated and informed them as well." Bryson said it was "a great honor" to receive the award, which is honorary because he is not a British citizen.

A former journalist, Bryson is best known for Notes on a Small Island. A 2003 poll of British readers chose the book about modern Britain as the work that best described British identity and the state of the nation. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Bryson first came to Britain in the early 1970s during a backpacking tour of Europe. He returned in 1975 and worked as a journalist until 1987, for both The Times of London and The Independent. After living in the United States for a time, he returned to Britain.

Bryson has also written on the history of the English language and science in A Short History of Nearly Everything. He is a commissioner for the preservation group English Heritage and was made Chancellor of Durham University in northern England in 2005, succeeding actor and director Peter Ustinov.

Key actors from the show lent their likenesses for "Desperate Housewives: The Game," while actress Brenda Strong provided the same spooky narration she delivers on the TV series. In the game, players assume the role of a new female neighbor that moves into the neighborhood. She interacts with the characters from the series to solve a new mystery. "When you are writing a video game, you are both trying to lead the player in the direction of the solution to the mystery," says Tobis, who also has worked on the "Housewives" TV series. "Over the course of the game, you're also trying to lead them astray to have fun, allowing them to mingle with the characters from the show."

Like many TV scribes, Tobis says that he tends to overwrite his scripts. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that video games are one medium where length is not a problem. "Video game writing takes a very different path than traditional entertainment because you want to lead the audience to a solution, but you deviate by offering a lot of different paths," Tobis says. "It's a bit like creating a family tree, or more accurately, a spread sheet."

The intricacy and depth of storytelling found in some contemporary games reflects the influence of a new generation of writers like Tobis, who move freely from penning film and TV projects to games.

"The game developers are starting to understand that the dialogue in games can't be the kind of dialogue that existed 10 years ago," Tobis says. "It's important to the future of gaming. Writers of video games, and some of them may come from Silicon Valley rather than Hollywood, are bringing a new level of sophistication and complexity to games."

7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, described by its author, Peter Golenbock, as an "inventive memoir" and by others who have seen the galley as something tantamount to pornography, is likely to evoke charges of bad taste and questionable ethics when it is published in March in a 60,000-copy first printing. It may even occasion claims of libel, according to publishing lawyers.

Two media insiders who have read the galley, each of whom asked not to be identified by name, used words like "porn," "debased," "exploitative" and "vile" to describe the book's contents. One of them said the book left him "speechless."

In the novel, Golenbock, author of dozens of sports titles, tells Mantle's story in the first person?"in Mickey's own words," as he said by telephone to PW, "so that readers will get a better idea of who Mickey was."

Judges said Li's stories of modern China and Chinese Americans in the US were "perfectly crafted". The Chinese author lives in California but was denied permanent residency in the US this year, despite letters of support from novelist Salman Rushdie.

*****

Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers describes the often bewildering changes being experienced by the people of China as the country's econominc growth accelerates. The book has already won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story award and the California Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers. Judging chair and Guardian literary editor Claire Armitstead said she was "delighted" to see Yiyun Li win.

"Short stories rarely win awards, partly because of a perception that, because they are short, they are intrinsically inferior to the novel," she said. "This collection shows triumphantly how, in the right hands, less can indeed be more." Li's win marks the fourth time the First Book Award has gone to a work of fiction since it was launched eight years ago.

Friedman joined HC in November 1997 and, under her leadership, the company's revenue has jumped nearly 80%, solidifying its position as one of the world's largest English-language publishers. In 2006, Friedman led HC's expansion into China and India, and directed the company's aggressive digital publishing efforts.

Other notables cited by the magazine for making a mark in the industry this year are Michael Hyatt, Thomas Nelson CEO; Mark Suchomel, head of IPG; Starbucks; and three publishers who were early on the sudoku bandwagon. Friedman and the other industry standouts will be profiled in Monday's issue of the magazine.

"The way I look at it, almost every comedy show or satire show I see uses the same talking points against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney," Surnow said. "The other side hasn't been skewered in a fair and balanced way."

The working title of the show has been "This Just In," but that will change because AOL just launched a broadband comedy channel by that name.

The pilot segs will be co-anchored by comedians Kurt Long and Susan Yeagley and feature a family of correspondents. "There will be some elements of 'The Daily Show' and some of 'Weekend Update,'" Surnow said.

Surnow originally pitched the show to Fox Entertainment prexy Peter Liguori, who is searching for latenight programming for the Fox network. Liguori passed but connected Surnow with Roger Ailes, who in addition to Fox News Channel also runs Twentieth Century Television and the Fox stations group.

The owners of nine Fox television affiliates in the U.S. will not air a two-part special in which O.J. Simpson speaks about the killing of his ex-wife.

Lin Broadcasting and Pappas Broadcasting, both small chains with stations in small and mid-sized cities, say the program If I Did It, Here's How It Happened does not serve the public interest.

In the show, scheduled for broadcast Nov. 27 and 29, Simpson is to speak in "hypothetical terms" about how he would have committed the 1994 killing of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman "if he were the one responsible."