Every book festival needs legendary dudes like DENNIS LEHANE and TOM PERROTTA -- the kinds of authors whose stories are famous even to people who don't read books. The awesome thing about Lehane and Perrotta is that they've both given far more than their celebrity to the cause: last year Lehane used his star power to throw some shine on Boston's lesser-known mystery authors in Boston Noir, a compendium whose launch party headlined the inaugural Boston Book Festival.

Just to make sure, we decided to wait until the Curse of the Hornbino had been demolished by Your 2007 Boston Red Sox before posting the rest of Nick Hornby's Q&A at the Devotion School in Brookline, where the patron saint of record-store geeks and football obsessives appeared last week to read from his so-called young-adult novel Slam, about a Tony Hawk-worshipping teenager named Sam who flees his hometown after knocking up his girlfriend.

The NY Times noticed the recent commercialization of Jane Austen on Sunday:

How did this early-19th-century novelist become the chick-lit, chick-flick queen for today? It is not only because she is an enduring writer. So is Melville, but bumper stickers and T-shirts read “What would Jane do?” not “What would Herman do?” A few other female writers have achieved pop culture celebrity: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath for the drama of their suicides, the Brontës for the gothic romance of their novels and the contrast to their quiet lives.

We can't stop OMG-ing over these amazing graphic renderings of what will soon become The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Ok, so it'll be built in lame muggy Orlando as opposed to the moors of Britain, which sucks, but whatever. We're sure J.K. Rowling can invest her bajillions in some kind of park-wide fog/mist machine. Anyway.

Dig on this: J.K. Rowling's final installment for the HP series, titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is set to be published on July 21, 2007! Also, the new film will open July 13. Translation: July is Harry Mania. From the NYT:

Millions of fans around the world are fiercely anticipating this latest installment.

Frequent readers of this literary blog know that we are somewhat, ehem, fixated and irrevocably OBSESSED with the Harry Potter series and its accompanying films. While the books have never failed to disappoint us, we've had lots of issues with the movies -- especially the last one, Goblet of Fire. Don't get us started.

Given that sequels have become almost more common than originals, it’s no wonder that MICHAEL TOLKIN is attempting to get back in the game with a decade-late follow-up to his satire The Player. In The Return of the Player, old Griffin Mill is down to his last $6 million. He’s also got erectile dysfunction and the hots for his ex-wife, and he’s paralyzed by his fear that the world will end before he can escape to his very own private island.

Morgan Spurlock did it with Super Size Me and later 30 Days on FX. Now, rather than gorging on McDonalds to see if it has adverse effects, Seattle public radio commentator JON MOE decided to hang out with a bunch of Republicans for a month straight. Conservatize Me: How I Tried to Become a Righty with the Help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith, and Beef Jerky is the result of his month-long immersion in Conservative Country.

Right. First things first, here's your readings option for tomorrow:

Mrs. Dracula

ELIZABETH KOSTOVA was so obsessed with Dracula, she spent a decade researching the legend, originally inspired by “pleasantly creepy” tales her father told her about the vampire when she was a girl. Ten years later, the first-time novelist cashed into a publishing jackpot — a $2 million advance for The Historian, seven-figure rights to the film, dozens of rave reviews, and a #1 slot on bestseller lists.

A 10^th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace’s juggernaut of a novel Infinite Jest is being released in November. (Amazon lists the date as November 13). And according to the Howling Fantods, the premiere site for all things DFW, Dave Eggers wrote the forward.

In other DFDubs news, John Krasinski, the 26 year-old Newton native who plays Jim on The Office, is making a movie based on Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which includes the story “Forever Overhead,” which I read as a 13 year old in the Best American Fiction anthology of 1992; I fell hard for DFW after that).

A few snippets for your Monday afternoon:

Via Pitchfork:
The list of bands Peter Ellenby has photographed since he began in 1994 reads like the graduation announcement for a whole class full of indie rock elites, from role models such as Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, Frank Black, and Mike Watt to the more recent likes of Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, and .

The author of YA fave Bad Girls, Alex McAuley, has a new fluff book out this month: Summer Love. MTV film execs are dying to cast Avril Lavigne and Kristen Cavalleri opposite each other on the film adaptation of the novel. McAuley's sums up the title on her website:

"It's Laguna Beach meets Cape Fear when a rich girl from California confronts murder and isolation on North Carolina's stormy Outer Banks."

"Ashima never thinks of her husband's name when she thinks of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname but refuses, for propriety's sake, to utter his first. It's not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over."