July Publishing Notes

The buzz: Diana Rigg will star in the London stage adaptation of Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Terrence McNally’s The Ritz will return to Broadway this fall with Rosie Perez and Kevin Chamberlain. Faith Prince, Tom Wopat, and Harvey Fierstein will star in A Catered Affair, a new musical by Fierstein and composer John Bucchino planned for Broadway next spring, based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky and a 1956 movie. Towleroad reported that Gore Vidal is unhappy with the characters in Edmund White’s new play Terre Haute, which is said to be based on an imagined series of conversations between Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Vidal. Gus Van Sant is attached to the film version of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Test. Jim Carrey will play a Texas convict who falls in love with his cellmate in the comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, based on the book by Steve McVicker. Rosie O’Donnell promised the folks at the recent BookExpo that her new book, Celebrity Detox, out this fall, will not be vindictive or mean-spirited. Rita Mae Brown's next three books in the Mrs. Murphy mystery series are forthcoming from Bantam Dell. Oprah’s new book club pick is Jeffrey Eugenides 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex, the story of a Greek-American girl who becomes boy. Frontiers in Los Angeles launched Summer Book, a citywide reading program for gay L.A, selecting Christopher Rice’s Light Before Day as the first read. Mayor Gavin Newson proclaimed June 12, 2007 as “Michael Tolliver Day” in San Francisco in honor of Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, one of the main characters of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and the narrator of Maupin’s new book, Michael Tolliver Lives. Former London police officer Brian Paddick has signed a six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster to publish his memoir. Author Perry Brass has released a new novel, Carnal Sacraments. Dale Peck’s new novel, The Garden of Lost and Found, about a young Midwesterner who moves to New York on the eve of 9/11, has been withdrawn at the request of the author and agent from the Carroll & Graf fall list due to the reorganization of new owner Perseus Book Group. A New York civil court jury found writer Laura Albert, who created the alter-ego JT Leroy, acted fraudulently and ordered her to pay $116,500 to Antidote International Films, which in 2003, signed an option contract with JT Leroy to make a feature film of the novel Sarah. The Oak Park Public Library, a suburban Chicago library, received a $3000 grant from the Illinois State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, enabling it to develop the country’s first transgender resource collection. Writer and editor Stephen Greco, who runs the Ferro-Grumley Foundation, has been named as executive director of Dance Theater Workshop. The Norfolk, Virginia branch of Lambda Rising bookstore closed at the end of June. Two new blogs covering the GLBT literary universe have arrived: the anonymously authored Best Gay Books, and poet Christopher Matthew Hennessy's areyououtsidethelines.blogspot.com.

Open Calls: Jeremy Halinen and Brett Ortler are editing of a new print literary magazine called Knockout and welcomes LGBT submissions. The first issue will arrive in September 2007. The editors are now reading submissions for the second issue, and request submissions of 3-6 unpublished poems, sent all in one file, as an MS Word document, to the following two email addresses: knockoutpoetry@gmail.com and jeremyhalinen@yahoo.com. Deadline is August 15, 2007. The editors are not considering unsolicited fiction or nonfiction submissions at this time.