According to Variety, Will Smith is among a group of producers who have optioned The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, an upcoming book by Benjamin Wallace. There were no reports on when production might begin.

The story centers on an auctioned cache of wine bottles and the scandal that follows. In 1985, a member of the Forbes family purchased a bottle of Bordeaux for $156,000 at auction. The bottle was believed to have been part of a cache that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. After paying half a million for the other bottles, billionaire Bill Koch paid an additional million to confirm their authenticity. The wines turned out to be bogus, and Koch sued Hardy Rodenstock, who had supposedly unearthed the bottles and sold them at auction.

So here’s a good one: earlier this year, in an effort to discover new talent, Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, teamed up with the social networking site Gather.com to launch a competition entitled “First Chapters”. Taking its cues from American Idol and its ilk, the website offered a forum for any writer to post a first chapter to be judged and voted on by the general populous. When all was said and done, more than 2,600 writers responded, and those entries were pared down to five finalists, who were in turn judged by a team of industry professionals and pared down to two. The grand prize winner, Terry Shaw, submitted his novel, The Way Life Should Be, entirely on a last-minute whim; runner-up Geoffery Edwards had sent his Civil War epic Fire Bell in the Night to more than three hundred publishers before being discovered. Now, come Sept. 18, both will be enjoying prominent positions in Borders Stores across the country. Hot damn.

The contest was so successful that Gather.com has started another — this one for romance writers — and plans to hold more general fiction competitions in the near future.

Read the original NPR article here.

It makes you feel like you’re in seventh grade again, all these summer reading lists. They do have their purpose, though, and everyone has found one or two books worthwhile on them. The latest, and probably last of the season, appeared on NPR’s Day to Day this morning, and includes books from James Lee Burke, Tina Brown, Ridley Pearson and several others. Certainly some stuff worth checking out.

Read the list here. A 500 word report will be due on the first day of school.

Nora Roberts has sold over 294 million books, writes at a clip of a book a month, and has set up shop permanently on the New York Times Bestseller List. Certainly such achievements should be honored, and in the only way Americans know how: bobble head dolls.

Yesterday was officially Nora Roberts Day in the small burg of Hagerstown, Maryland. The Washington County hamlet will honor their local girl done good with at a Hagerstown Suns baseball game, during which 1,000 commemorative edition bobble head dolls will be passed out to lucky fans. Roberts, who likes to attend as many Suns games as her hectic schedule allows, will throw out the first pitch.

If that wasn’t enough, it was also Robert’s wedding anniversary. How about that?

Read the Hagerstown Herald-Mail article here.

(Photo credit: Ric Dugan / Staff Photographer)

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.

Do you know Timothy McSweeney?

McSweeney’s Publishing, the brain child of Pulitzer Prize-finalist Dave Eggers, has long been a bright light in the land of indie publishing. Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, a quarterly fiction magazine, is in its 23 issue and has featured work from the likes of Eggers himself, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Letham, Miranda July, Roddy Doyle and a whole slew of others.

The issues routinely break the bounds of book design (the 22 issue was held together entirely by magnets; 16 came with a story printed on the back of playing cards that made sense anyway you shuffled them) and oftentimes provides space for new and upcoming artists to showcase their work. McSweeney’s also publishes full length books, and has done so for Eggers, Nick Hornby, David Byrne, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, George Saunders, Lawrence Weschler, Robert Coover (who was responsible for the aforementioned playing cards) and Chris Adrian, among others.

Now, wouldn’t you want an institution like that in your neighborhood?

Unfortunately, McSweeney’s won’t be in anyone’s neighborhood unless they raise $130,000, the amount lost when their distributer filed for bankruptcy last December. To help ease the pain, they are holding various auctions over the next several days that include, but are not limited to, a Dave Eggers portrait of George Bush as a double-amputee; a mix tape by Nick Hornby; original art work by Marcel Dzama and David Byrne; autographed and rare issues of McSweeney’s sponsored culture magazine The Believer, old and rare issues of the quarterly and piles of other neat things yet to be announced.

Check out the McSweeney’s Website, and if you like what you see, head on over to the auction. If nothing catches your eye there, you can still help out by browsing through the McSweeney’s Store and picking up something there. Be sure also to check out other small presses like Soft Skull and Counterpoint, both of whom are similarly effected by the bankruptcy.

Have a heart, buy a book!