The most talked about prequel miniseries in the comic industry, BEFORE THE WATCHMEN, are about to be collected in 4 deluxe hardcover editions. DC Comics just announced that the book covers will be designed by Chip Kidd and they have given them a release date of this summer.

Having previously designed a variant cover for BEFORE WATCHMEN: RORSCHACH issue #3, Chip Kidd was recently asked by DC Comics about what it means to him to design these historic covers. Here's what he had to say, “To design these covers is both a privilege and an honor. And a challenge! The ‘Before Watchmen’ creative team did a truly impressive job, and I will try to do justice to them. So to speak.”

Well, we can't wait to see them and we hope you're just as excited as we are. So stay tuned for their future reveal.

We have some really great news to share and we’re also very proud of the Author/Graphic Novelist Leela Corman. She just received a really great Book Review over at the VILLAGE VOICE for her new Graphic Novel, UNTERZAKHN, published by Pantheon Books.

HELL YEAH! They have a News Reporter over there named Diana Clarke and this Woman wrote a wonderful review that is both very in-depth and has a lot of insight into the book. So, when you get a chance, or if you’re not doing anything right now (ha ha), then please CLICK HERE and give it a quick read. If you have been thinking about reading this book then it will really inspire you.

Pantheon Books, a division of Random House who’s main focus are Graphic Novels, is having a “Fan Art” Competition starting right NOW and it will only last about one week. It’s called “PANTHEON PANELS”. Here’s the deal:

Submit a one-page comic representing the home you grew up in, but drawn in the style of Chris Ware's “Building Stories”.

Deadline is Friday, March 1st. Winners will be announced/posted on Friday, March 8th.

Please submit your original artwork in a standard image format-jpg, pdf, tif, etc. Images should be RGB, 72-300 dpi, and no larger than 1.5 megs.

Please submit your material to pantheonpanels@randomhouse.com
Good Luck!

All of us here are really proud of the Book Author, Karen Russell, for receiving a totally wonderful and well thought-out book review for her latest work titled, VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE (Knopf), at the New York Times Sunday Book Review! Her work is both entertaining & hilarious! This new book is a collection of stories and check out what one of the things the NY Times Reporter, Joy Williams, had to say about them, “Her work has a velocity and trajectory that is little less than dazzling and a tough, enveloping, exhilarating voice that cannot be equaled. Sometimes not even by Karen Russell herself.”

To read the Review, please CLICK HERE!

This is just a fun post to share some recently created graphics that celebrate both Book and Authors. You might recognize some of these Writers: Haruki Murakami, Dr. Seuss (represented by the Cat in the Hat! ), and Neil Gaiman.

Please feel free to share these on your favorite social networking website, like Facebook and Twitter. Thanks!

The finalists for the 33rd L.A. Times Book Prizes were announced Thursday morning and we have to say that we’re pretty proud of the Authors who made the list who are published by Random House, Knopf, and Pantheon. Actually, we’re happy for everybody on the list but we also want to send a shout-out to the Authors we are associated with, ha! So, Please check out the complete list down below.

The 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes will be presented on Friday, April 19, 2013, 7:30 pm, in a public ceremony in the Bovard Auditorium on the campus of USC. The 2012 Book Prizes Innovator's Award Winner, Robert Kirsch Award Winner, and category finalists as listed below were announced publicly on February 21st, 2013, in advance of the April 19th ceremony. For more details, CLICK HERE!

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes 2012 Honorees
-----
Biography
-----

H.W. Brands / The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace (Doubleday)
Robert Caro / The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)
Alice Kessler-Harris / A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (Bloomsbury Press)
David Nasaw / The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (Penguin Press)
R.J. Smith / The One: The Life and Music of James Brown (Gotham Books)

-----
Current Interest
-----

Katherine Boo / Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
Steve Coll / Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (Penguin Press)
Karen Elliott House / On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (Knopf)
Jim Sterba / Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds (Crown)
Jake Tapper / The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (Little, Brown and Company)

-----
Fiction
-----

Jami Attenberg / The Middlesteins: A Novel (Grand Central Publishing)
Michael Chabon / Telegraph Avenue (HarperCollins Publishers / Harper)
Ben Fountain / Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (HarperCollins Publishers / Ecco)
Lauren Groff / Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion)
Lydia Millet / Magnificence (W.W. Norton & Company)

-----
Graphic Novel/Comics
-----

Alison Bechdel / Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Leela Corman / Unterzakhn (Schocken)
Sammy Harkham / Everything Together: Collected Stories (PictureBox)
Spain Rodriguez / Cruisin' With the Hound: The Life and Times of Fred Toote (Fantagraphics)
Chris Ware / Building Stories (Pantheon)

-----
History
-----

John Barry / Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (Viking)
George Black / Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone (St. Martin's Press)
Fergus M. Bordewich / America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (Simon & Schuster)
Amy S. Greenberg / A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (Knopf)
Geoffrey Kabaservice / Rule & Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press)

-----
Mystery / Thriller
-----

Tana French / Broken Harbor (Viking)
Nick Harkaway / Angelmaker (Knopf)
Fuminori Nakamura / The Thief (Soho Crime)
Chris Pavone / The Expats (Crown)
Ariel S. Winter / The Twenty-Year Death (Hard Case Crime)

-----
Poetry
-----

Louise Gl ck / Poems 1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Rowan Ricardo Phillips / The Ground: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
D. A. Powell / Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys: Poems (Graywolf Press)
Bin Ramke / Aerial (Omnidawn)
Cole Swensen / Gravesend (New California Poetry) (University of California Press)

-----
Science & Technology
-----

Susan Cain / Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Crown)
George Dyson / Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon)
Jonathan Gottschall / The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Nate Silver / The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't (Penguin Press)
Florence Williams / Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (W.W. Norton & Company)

-----
The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
-----

David Abrams / Fobbit (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, Inc.)
Kevin P. Keating / The Natural Order of Things (Aqueous Books)
Lydia Netzer / Shine Shine Shine (St. Martin's Press)
Maggie Shipstead / Seating Arrangements (Knopf)
Robin Sloan / Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Book Store: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

-----
Young Adult Literature
-----

Paolo Bacigalupi / The Drowned Cities (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers)
A.S. King / Ask the Passengers (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers)
Martine Leavitt / My Book of Life by Angel (Margaret Ferguson Books/Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers)
Matthew Quick / Boy 21 (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers)
Elizabeth Wein / Code Name Verity (Disney-Hyperion)

Presented here, for your viewing pleasure, is this very excellent student documentary project that was completed in April 2012. It’s titled, “EPILOGUE: The Future of Print”, and it shares quite a bit to think about when thinking about the value of books published on paper, real books, verses the effects of modern day eBooks. It also shares some important thoughts about Bookstores and the human touch of actual Book Sellers.

It’s official!! The United States Justice Department has closed an investigation of a proposed merger between Penguin and Random House and will take no action to stop the deal that would create the world’s largest publisher of consumer books.

Media company Pearson seeks to merge its Penguin Books division with Random House, which is owned by German media company Bertelsmann. The proposed publishing house would have around a quarter of the consumer book market.

In a recent article at the HUFFINGTON POST they shared this news, for more details please CLICK HERE!

Oh hell yeah! We wanna thank the very cool & extremely sexy RIP JAGGER’S DOJO website for writing a super-excellent Book Review for Chip Kidd’s new book, “SHAZAM! The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal”. This book is doing pretty well and it’s great to see somebody excited about it. The article has some very excellent photos of the book’s contents so please be sure to check it out. Hey, just CLICK HERE! Thanks Rip!

True-Life Font Freaks will totally love this and, who knows, you might learn a little bit about Graphic Design or Typography while you’re at it! OK, I don’t care what this guy in the video says, I still hate Comic Sans, ha ha!