The self-published Star Wars fan novel Another Hope was finally pulled from sale on Amazon.com on April 25, though copyright holder Lucasfilm had asked it to be removed at least a day earlier. The listing, however, remains. The book, an unlicensed and unauthorized book by Lori Jareo, has also been removed from sale at Barnes&Noble.com, but remains on sale at Amazon.co.uk as of 10 a.m. PT April 26. A listing also remains on Powells.com, though the book is listed as being "out of stock."

Lucasfilm spokeswoman Lynne Hale had told SCI FI Wire that the company asked Jareo to remove the book from sale, and that she had complied happily. SCI FI Wire e-mails to Jareo have gone unanswered. News of the book first broke on the blogs of writers John Scalzi, Nick Mamatas and Lee Goldberg.

MEG CABOT'S BOOK SIGNING DO'S AND DON'TS FOR WRITERS:

1) DON'T BE A SLOB

Writers, I recognize that you are sensitive artists who want to be known for your creative writing, not your fashion sense. But for the love of God, people, you are at a book signing. Your readers are seeing you live and in person for the first time. SO WHY DIDN'T YOU BRUSH YOUR HAIR?????

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2) DON'T BE A WEIRDO

If there is anything that burns me up more than an author who makes no effort to look nice for his or her readers, it's authors who act all weird because they think people in the "creative arts" are "special."

I am not talking about throwing on a tiara and a feather boa, either. I am talking about authors who pretend their books aren't written by them, but by their characters. As in, "I didn't want to kill off So-and-So, but Name of Main Character insisted on it! There was nothing I could do!"

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...I fear that some authors say things like this so often, they are actually starting to believe it. I know this because authors are saying it to ME, in private conversations, with no readers present. And I find myself going, "Uh-huh. Really? Your characters actually talk to you? That's so interesting, because you know, I made my characters up, so they can't talk to me, because they ARE NOT REAL."

The truth is, authors, characters cannot act and think independently of you because they are FIGMENTS OF YOUR IMAGINATION. When your character says or does something, it is because YOU MADE THEM DO IT. Your characters DO NOT ACTUALLY EXIST except on paper and in your head.

In a closely watched workplace speech case, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that the sexual banter among writers on the hit series "Friends" did not violate the rights of a writers' assistant who sued for harassment. The 7-0 decision by the high court marked the end of Amaani Lyle's lawsuit, which was filed after she was fired in October 1999 over the quality of her transcription skills.

Warner Bros. Television Production and the other defendants -- NBC Studios, Bright/Kauffman/Crane Prods. and writer-producers Adam Chase, Gregory Malins and Andrew Reich -- asserted First Amendment rights to free speech, but the justices did not need to consider what essentially was their second line of defense. The high court instead threw it out on the grounds that Lyle's claims did not amount to harassment under California law.

"The record discloses that most of the sexually coarse and vulgar language at issue did not involve and was not aimed at plaintiff or other women in the workplace," according to the 48-page opinion. Looking at all the facts, including the fact that "Friends" involved "a creative workplace focused on generating scripts for an adult-oriented comedy show featuring sexual themes," the justices said that no "reasonable" judge or jury would find that the language constituted harassment or created a hostile workplace.

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It was Lyle's job to listen to the jokes and document them for potential use in scripts. She was fired after four months because of problems with her typing and transcription skills, the court said. "In reaching this conclusion, we do not suggest the use of sexually coarse and vulgar language in the workplace can never constitute harassment because of sex," the justices said. "Nor do we imply that employees generally should be free, without employer restriction, to engage in sexually coarse and vulgar language or conduct at the workplace. We simply recognize that (the state's harassment law) is not designed to rid the workplace of vulgarity."

Universities are employing some of Britain's best-known authors to teach creative writing to an unprecedented number of students. Lucrative book deals and the new breed of celebrity author have led to a surge of interest in a potential career in writing. Universities across the country are cashing in on the glamorous new image, with 85 offering postgraduate creative writing courses, compared with fewer than 10 a decade ago. Statistics from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) show that a third of institutions now run an undergraduate creative writing course, or offer it as an option with disciplines as wide-ranging as theology and human biosciences.

As competition to attract quality applicants grows, leading figures in the literary world are being enticed to head departments. Brunel University, in Middlesex, is the latest to capitalise on the trend and has just appointed the veteran novelist Fay Weldon, 74, to be the chairman of its new creative writing MA. She told The Sunday Telegraph: "It is a growing industry. I don't think it is about being a name, what is important is having practical experience. "It is in the initial stages, when people have an idea but they don't quite know how to start, that you can help, making sure that they don't set out on a path that will be intolerably difficult." Weldon said that the potential of big financial rewards had generated interest in creative writing courses. "You do have to have some talent, but it is also possible to teach a craft," she added.

Britain's most celebrated creative writing course, at the University of East Anglia, was established in 1965 by the late Sir Malcolm Bradbury, the author of The History Man. He was succeeded by Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, who now heads the creative writing course at Royal Holloway, University of London. Now the novelists Mich?le Roberts and Patricia Duncker run the UEA course, which has more than 400 applicants for 45 places.

The MA at Sheffield Hallam University is also oversubscribed. Run by Jane Rogers, the author of Mr Wroe's Virgins, it has on its staff Barry Hines, whose A Kestrel for a Knave was made into the film Kes. Oxford University launched its creative writing masters last year, which is run by Clare Morgan, a prize-winning novelist, short story writer and poet.

Such courses have produced high-profile success stories, including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tracy Chevalier and Ali Smith, but not all graduates achieve such literary success. According to Russell Celyn Jones, a professor of creative writing at Birkbeck College, London, only one in five graduates goes on to be published. But even those who succeed can expect to earn as little as £15,000 per book, according to the Society of Authors.

The year-long Complete Works festival, which begins on the anniversary of the bard's death, will stage his sonnets, poems and all 37 Shakespeare plays. Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen are among the performers taking part. RSC artistic director Michael Boyd told the BBC that the event would be a "national knees-up". "Our ambition is to stage one of the most significant cultural festivals of the year in Stratford-upon-Avon," said Mr Boyd. Shakespeare is traditionally said to have been born on 23 April 1564, and to have died on the same day 52 years later, in 1616. Hailed as the biggest theatrical celebration in the company's history, the RSC claims the festival marks the first time all the plays have been staged in one continuous season.

Seventeen overseas theatre companies and 14 UK theatre companies will perform at the festival, as well as the 23 productions being staged by the RSC. Ten of the productions will be in languages other than English, at least in part. "It shows how fantastically universal the plays are, and seeing people's different approach," said Dame Judi, who will play Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

BBC arts correspondent Rebecca Jones called the project "a gamble", but said ticket sales were already up by a 25 per cent on the equivalent period last year. "If the festival is a success it could help revitalise a company which has been criticised by some for losing its way," said Jones. A new outdoor theatre - The Dell - will be built in the riverside gardens beside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and a temporary 100-seat studio will be erected inside the auditorium for a month. Actors will also perform in the 1,000-seat Courtyard Theatre, which is scheduled to open in July 2006, and Holy Trinity Church, the burial place of Shakespeare.

Some 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as "other."

But by the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the world's languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path. Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall University, calls English "the most invasive linguistic species in the world." Spanish and Hindi are also spreading, subsuming the dialects of South American Indians, and of the Indian subcontinent.

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English may be eating up other languages, but paradoxically translation into English is vital for their survival, Mr. Rushdie said. "People are not going to learn Serbian," he said. "If Serbian writers are going to survive in the world, they will have to be translated into English."

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"Some languages are dying and some are appearing," she said. "That is a much deeper and more interesting dynamic." Maybe, Ms. Ugresic said, the new language of globalization will be "Smurfentaal," a kind of slang with bits of Dutch and other languages, among them Moroccan, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish, spoken by young people on the streets of Amsterdam. "Every honest linguist will tell you the preservation of language is a lost battle," Ms. Ugresic said, "because you can't deal with language dogmatically. Language is a living thing. "So let it go."

Towelie's Memoirs are chosen for Oprah's Book Club in an all-new episode of South Park premiering Wednesday, April 19 at 10:00 P.M. on Comedy Central. Towelie?s book is the next big pick in Oprah?s Book Club in an all-new episode of South Park titled A Million Little Fibers premiering Wednesday, April 19 at 10 p.m. on Comedy Central.

Towelie gets over his drug addition and writes a moving book about his experiences. Thanks to Oprah?s support, the book becomes a best seller and his story inspires millions to turn their lives around. However, when he?s caught in a lie by the grand dame of daytime television, Towelie?s old habits start to look might appealing.

She can't draw. She can't sing or dance. But she's always been able to sit in a corner and listen. And she has loved to read since she was 3 years old. "When you read all the time, language comes naturally to you," Susan Straight said by phone from her Riverside, Calif., home. Her most recent novel, "A Million Nightingales," traces the amazing life of a young slave girl growing up in Louisiana in the early 1800s.

Straight, who lives with her three daughters, teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She does most of her writing by hand in little notebooks while sitting in the car waiting for one of her daughters. Then she does the rest in the evenings after her daughters are in bed. "Being a good listener is essential," Straight tells her students. In fact, she believes most writers are natural eavesdroppers. They work hard to learn "the natural rhythms of people's speech. You have to get the dialogue right."

As a lover of language, Straight also speaks French, Spanish and Swiss-German. She found it difficult, though, during her research trips, to be fluent in "Louisiana French," which has its own dialect. "Nightingales" is Straight's first historical novel, although she has written four previous books.

Hoping to cash in on the current domestic tragedy of the moment making headlines--that of Mary Winkler, the southern preacher's wife who, for still-inexplicable reasons, killed her husband and then fled the scene with their kids--St. Martin's Press has signed a book on the seemingly demure, down-home housewife. Winkler's story, which has been picked up by papers across the country and appeared in last week's People magazine, will be written by Diane Fanning (author of the similar-themed 2006 Edgar-nominated Written in Blood, about another spousal murder case in 2001); the work is tentatively titled (what else?) The Preacher's Wife.

The true crime title is being crashed by the house which hopes to, as publicist John Karle put it, "publish the book as soon as possible." Winkler is currently sitting in a Tennessee prison.

The suit, filed in Chicago on Monday, alleges that Levitt defamed researcher John Lott with comments about his research on gun control. Levitt writes in Freakonomics that no one has been able to replicate Lott?s research, which claims to have found that the right to carry guns leads to lower crime rates. The assertion that those findings have not been backed up with outside research, the lawsuit charges, implies that Lott falsified his results.

Freakonomics, which was published last May by Harper imprint Morrow, "damages Lott?s reputation in the eyes of the academic community in which he works, and in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of academics, college students, graduate students and members of the general public who read Freakonomics," the suit contends. As tracked by Nielsen BookScan, Freakonomics has sold more than 909,000 units since its release.

Lott, recently a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is seeking unspecified damages, a stop in sales of Freakonomics and a retraction printed in future editions of the book. Levitt?s co-author, Stephen J. Dubner, was not named in the suit.

In 1948, a gangly Californian with a preposterously fluty voice stomped into Paris on size 12 feet. Newly married and utterly clueless, she knew only a few words of French. She could not cook. But in a miraculous transformation, Julia Child would, over the next 15 years, become an authority on French cuisine, the principal author of the classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and, on returning to the United States, the much loved star of the long-running cooking show "The French Chef."

"My Life in France," written with Alex Prud'homme, is Child's exuberant, affectionate and boundlessly charming account of that transformation. It chronicles, in mouth-watering detail, the meals and the food markets that sparked her interest in French cooking, and her growing appreciation of all things French. It also tells the story of the inspired partnership between Child, who died in 2004, and her husband, Paul, a sensualist and cosmopolitan who cheered his wife on every step of the way, tasted all her experiments in the kitchen and imparted his considerable knowledge of French wine and culture. As Child puts it, with considerable understatement, "We were a good team."

Child had a lot to learn. "What's a shallot?" she asked, on sitting down to one of her first French meals, in Rouen. No matter. Ignorance was, in a sense, one of her great strengths, since it was joined to a steely determination to get to the bottom of every mystery that French culture threw her way. She was methodical and rigorous, qualities that had stood her in good stead when she worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the war, and that would define her method in codifying French cuisine. "I could be overly emotional, but was lucky to have the kind of orderly mind that is good at categorizing things," she writes.

She also had an outgoing personality and an unfeigned fascination with French ingredients and cooking methods that won over the chefs and market-stall vendors she peppered with questions in her quickly improving French. At the Cordon Bleu cooking school, run by the odious Madame Brassart, she thrived under the tutelage of the chef Max Bugnard. Although a stickler for technique, Bugnard held firm to the pleasure principle in cooking, telling his pupil, "Yes, Madame Scheeld, fun!" or, simply, "Joy!"

Michiko Kakutani recently embarked on her 25th year as a New York Times book critic, and it's gotten to the point that when her name is mentioned in print, you can see the smoke rising from the page. The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank." Most notoriously, last year Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.

Those who rip her are usually authors she has ripped, and their indignation often muddies their logic. Certainly Mailer's insinuations, in addition to being boorish, are unsupportable. It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time. (I slightly knew Kakutani when we were undergraduates at Yale about 30 years ago but have not spoken to her since.)

But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint?the job is called critic, after all?but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics' bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of "The Rite of Spring" and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

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The qualities most glaringly missing from Kakutani's work are humor and wit. Maybe in an attempt to compensate, she writes one or two parody reviews a year: of a book about swinging London in the voice of Austin Powers, of a Bridget Jones book in the voice of Ally McBeal, of Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision in the voice of Holden Caulfield, of Truman Capote's recently discovered novella in the voice of Holly Golightly. Talk about cringe-making. They are so awful, from start to finish, that you cannot avert your eyes, much as you would like to.

"Casablanca" has topped the list of "101 Greatest Screenplays," a first-ever ranking by members of the Writers Guild of America that was revealed Thursday night at a reception in Beverly Hills. The screenplay for "Casablanca," by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, was followed, in order, by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Robert Towne's "Chinatown," Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" and Joseph Mankiewicz's "All About Eve ."

"This list and the films on it are meant to be scrutinized and criticized, dissected and collected, viewed and reviewed," WGA West president Patric Verrone said. "They are the literature of our industry and the legacy of our union." Added WGA East president Chris Albers: "It's difficult to think of American life without the films on this list. Just reading the titles reminds us of the fantastic journeys they have provided."

The results, sponsored by the unions and Premiere magazine, were revealed at a gala tribute at the Writers Guild Theater. Members nominated more than 1,400 screenplays. Any produced screenplay was eligible regardless of era or language. Rounding out the top 10 are Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman's "Annie Hall," Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman Jr.'s "Sunset Blvd.," Paddy Chayefsky's "Network," Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's "Some Like It Hot" and Coppola and Puzo's "The Godfather Part II."

All Shook Up's Christopher Ashley is set to direct a new musical production of Xanadu ? based on the 1980 film of the same name ? Off-Broadway in spring 2007.

Douglas Carter Beane will pen the book for the production, which will be produced by Robert Ahrens. The musical will utilize songs from the movie's soundtrack. The film featured tunes by John Farrar and Jeff Lynne, including "Xanadu," "All Over the World," "I'm Alive," "Magic" and "Suddenly."

Playwright Douglas Carter Beane is the author of The Little Dog Laughed, As Bees in Honey Drown, The Country Club, Music From a Sparkling Planet, Advice From a Caterpillar, White Lies and Devil May Care and Old Money. Director Christopher Ashley has directed All Shook Up, The Smell of the Kill, Voices in the Dark, Princesses, As Thousands Cheers, The Country Club, Rude Entertainment, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, Jeffrey, Blown Sideways Through Life, Fires in the Mirror, Bunny Bunny and Das Barbecu.

After losing a copyright claim against Random House, the publishers of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Leigh, an American-born novelist and historian, and his colleague, Michael Baigent, have to make a down payment of ?350,000 in the next 28 days. Even after that they will still owe ?750,000 - plus their own costs, estimated in court at ?800,000.

It was one of the most expensive mistakes in British legal history and Leigh, shell-shocked by the verdict, admitted that he had no idea how he would find the money. "I welcome any suggestions on that," he said. Baigent and Leigh had accused Brown of stealing the "central themes" and "architecture" of their 1982 book, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail - a claim totally rejected by Mr Justice Peter Smith. Both books posit the theory that Jesus Christ married and had children with Mary Magdalene, the bloodline continuing to this day.

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After ordering the two men to meet 85 per cent of the costs of the publisher Random House, which coincidentally published both books, Mr Justice Smith asked how the two men were going to meet the bill. The answer was unclear, although their lawyer suggested that one of them might have to sell their house. At that point, James Abraham, QC, for the publisher, jumped up to say that it had never been his client's intention to bankrupt the two writers, or force anyone to sell their house. How else, asked the judge, are they going to pay?

The pair wrote the Holy Blood book with a third writer, Henry Lincoln, an Englishman who now lives in New Zealand. Lincoln, a former scriptwriter for Z Cars and Dr Who, has been as disparaging as his colleagues about Brown's book, but refused to subscribe to their lawsuit and did not attend the High Court hearing.