Mystery Melange

Carousel book sculpture by Cara Barer.

Twitter is hosting a Twitter Fiction Festival in November and is inviting "authors and creative storytellers around the world to push the bounds of what’s possible with Twitter content." The proposal must fit into the time window of the five day festival—but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour.

The Booksellers Association's IndieBound is adding a consumer website of "inspired recommendations" for readers from independent booksellers. The goal is to have booksellers submit book recommendations for titles they have loved, hidden gems, mid-list classics, or simply books selling well, to build up an "antidote to algorithm-based, chart-led, celebrity-endorsed book recommendations."

Actor Johnny Depp is partnering with Harper Collins to start a new literary imprint called Infinitum Nihil. It will publish titles reflecting Mr. Depp's eclectic tastes and interests, although only two have been mentioned thus far, a new work about Bob Dylan by the historian Douglas Brinkley and an unpublished novel by the folk singer Woody Guthrie.

A new study from the Pew Research Center about the reading habits of young people contained a few surprises: more than eight in ten Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read a book in the past year; a majority of Americans from the ages of 16 through 29 still frequent libraries; and readers under 30 who read electronically were more likely to read books on a cellphone or a computer than a dedicated eReader.

Here's an intriguing idea from Houston: a roaming bookmobile library that "facilitates serendipitous discoveries in many different locations." The founders, librarians, Kelly Allen and Chris Grawl, call it the Billy Pilgrim Traveling Library (BPTL) and envision it as both a free range bookmobile (operating on a rent-barter-donate system) and a bookmobile-for-hire to public libraries, museums, schools, and local businesses.

Coming up this weekend are four different literary festivals ranging from Texas to Canada. The QuebeCrime Festival features special guests Laura Lippman, Mark Billingham and Linwood Barclay; Magna cum Murder in Muncie, Indiana, welcomes Guest of Honor S.J. Rozan and Banquet Speaker Eric G. Wilson; the Boston Book Festival, which is light on crime fiction but does include Dennis Lehane and Hank Phillippi Ryan, among many other authors of interest; and the Texas Book Festival in Austin will feature close to 300 authors, including Michael Ennis, Jasper Fforde, Amelia Gray, Janice Hamrick, Stephen Saylor, Roland Smith, Ellis Weiner and Reavis Z. Wortham.

Want to win a trip to France? Omnimystery News brought to my attention that publisher Le French Book is offering just that as part of a promotion for a new line of translated French crime novels, including The 7th Woman, winner of the 2007 Prix du Quai des Orfèvres for best unpublished crime novel manuscript. But hurry - you have to enter by October 29th.