Lucky Santangelo is back, and you should be excited.

Jackie Collin’s mafia-princess-turned-Vegas-mogul makes a most triumphant return in Drop Dead Beautiful, a sequel to 1999’s Dangerous Kiss. The latest finds Santangelo simultaneously planning a mega-resort and her father’s 95th birthday, unaware that family-rival Anthony Bonnar is plotting revenge! From there, Collins takes the reader through a whirlwind of mafia justice, double-crossings, Internet predators, and, if Dr. Pepper isn’t enough for you, some supposedly fantastic sex scenes involving Bonnar’s wife, their Mexican gardener and a federal drug enforcement agent, though not necessarily at the same time.

Collins appeared on The Today Show yesterday, flustering Matt Lauer and discussing the plot of the book in more detail, the history of Lucky Santangelo, the sex scenes and Wolfgang Puck’s newest drink, The Jackie Collins.

Watch the interview here, and read more about Collins herself here.

For those of us who have forsaken sex as a past time of carefree, bygone years, The Today Show offers you this — Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love and the Sensual Years, a tome, nay bible on the topic of sex past age 50. Dr. Pepper Schwartz has assembled this book from 3 decades of answering questions on sex, emotions and relationships, and in the process, addresses more or less everything you could think of. As The Today Show puts it, “whether you’re looking to wake-up a tired sex life, start a new relationship, explore cyber-dating, indulge in a four-hand massage, flirt with gigolos on vacation or commit to the love of your life,” this book has what you need.

A brief excerpt has been posted on The Today Show Website.

In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there is a prison there known as the Wire, where those suspected of terrorism are detained, oftentimes without formal charges brought against them. To pass the time, many of them have turned to writing poetry. Attorney Mark Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, discovered this and edited together a volume of detainee poetry entitled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.

“It wasn’t just the first poem I’ve written in captivity,” says Moazzam Begg, a poet who was detained in Guantanamo for 3 years. “It’s the first poem I’ve ever written in my life of any meaning at all. It has particular significance because it describes, demonstrates and is a message to people outside of Guantanamo Bay of what I feel and what is happening around my surroundings.”

The poems, Falkoff says, are not at all a security risk, despite the army’s suggestion that the detainees were not writing for “the sake of art”, but rather using poetry as “another weapon to attack the Western ideals against which they are at war”.

You can read excerpts and listen to the full interview here.

“I have to convince the experts,” says Greg Bear on his style of “hard” science fiction — novels based on existing and plausible science. “These are the guys that spend their all their time in labs doing tests. They know when it’s not going to work.” The idea for Bear’s latest work, Quantico, came to him while working alongside the FBI to devise real-life methods for combating terrorism. THAT is how hard Bear is.

But he noticed something, though: Among all these new ideas and new technologies, there was very little addressing domestic terrorism. With echoes of the 2001 Anthrax scare still ringing in his head, he set to work creating a world in which domestic terrorism is the chief fear in America and dangerous pathogens and viruses are being created, both deliberately and inadvertently, in basements all across the country. Bear’s ultimate question is, how do we as a nation combat something so nebulous when we can’t just go in and blow everything all up.

Watch the full interview.

Russ Parsons knows flavor when he tastes it, and he knows that the best flavor usually isn’t found on the supermarket shelves, where produce is dyed, processed, preserved and sugared beyond recognition. A noted food-and-wine columnist for The Los Angeles Times, Parsons has put together a book entitled How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table.

Parsons appeared on Fresh Air from WHYY and discussed his eternal quest for flavor. He says strawberries are perhaps the fruit that has most suffered from the grower’s efforts to make them more easily transportable. “Strawberries in their original form are very fragile, and over time…[farmers] have been taking measures to make the berry more resilient, and it’s gotten to the point now where you have strawberries that, if you try to cut them with a fork, you would actually bend the fork.” He also tells you more about artichokes than you’d ever care to know.

Listen to the full interview, and read an excerpt on the aforementioned artichoke.

Does the name Jane Austen conjure nightmares of high-school English class? Of being called out in front of the whole class for not doing the reading? Of trying to decipher paragraph-long sentences? Me too.

But ’tis not the case for the protagonist of Shannon Hale’s latest novel, Austenland, which involves coming-of-age in Pembrook Park, a Regency England-era theme park for those women who never quite found their Mr. Darcys. Hale sat down with NPR and discusses her real-life love of Jane Austen, her fascination with Colin Firth’s rendering of Mr. Darcy and her qualms about undertaking Jane Austen, even in satire.

Listen to the full interview here.

NPR’s Book Czar Alan Cheuse has written a quick and largely favorable review of Rick Moody’s newest collection of short fiction, Right Livelihoods, which includes three novellas, The Omega Force, K & K, which Cheuse notes as the low point of the book, but followed finally by The Albertine Notes, an apocalyptic tale that describes a dirty bomb attack on Manhattan and the ensuing addiction to Albertine, a new drug that swallows millions of New York minds.
Listen to the full, if brief, review here.

As reported here last week, independent publishers all across the west coast are in financial disarray, the result of a distributer filing for bankruptcy in August. The most notable of these is McSweeney’s, a publishing house founded by Dave Eggers that has published work from Nick Hornby, Michael Chabon, Lydia Davis, David Byrne and dozens of others.

In hopes of alleviating the strain, the company has put on a massive sale: 30 percent off new titles, 50 percent off the backlist and an eBay auction featuring such items as a hand-painted apology letter to your boyfriend/girlfriend by the multi-talented Miranda July, or a tour of the Daily Show set by the multi-talented John Hodgeman. You can read the MediaBuzz article about the situation here, but for a more in-depth analysis of the whole situation, I suggest you turn to our friends at Salon.com, who have recently posted this article, which explains everything in far more detail than I could muster.

Don DeLillo, author most notably of Underworld and White Noise, seems like an author that does not enjoy writing, but rather writes out of a sense of obligation to himself and to the reader. His books tackle grandiose topics — death, love, popular culture — in grandiose ways and the results are always lucid and startling. No different is his latest, Falling Man, a novel of the weeks immediately following 9/11. The main character, Keith Neudecker, survives the attack, stumbling out of the North Tower and back home to desperately try to reconcile his old life with this new existence.

DeLillo sat down with All Things Considered, and said the whole book started with one photograph of a man walking from the rubble, holding somebody else’s suitcase. “I didn’t know who the man was at first, but what I did know was the fact that the briefcase he was carrying was not his and that seemed to suggest a mystery that needed to be solved.”

Listen to the whole interview here.

Middlesex Jeffery Eugendies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was the June pick for Oprah’s Book Club. The story, which you really should read, follows the course of a genetic mutation as it is passed down through three generations of the Stephanides family, emerging finally in their young daughter Calliope, born a hermaphrodite but raised a girl until puberty, when complications arise.

On the Book Club Web site, you can find an introduction to the book, an in-depth bio of Eugenides — who is also well known for his novel, The Virgin Suicides, which Sofia Coppola turned into a movie of the same name in 2003 — and a discussion of nature vs. nurture, which is actually fairly interesting.

I know you are bored at work reading this, so why not check it out?