Word: summerland
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Given that Summerland's publisher, Miramax Books, is an affiliate of Miramax studios, guess who will produce the inevitable Summerland film? Miramax Books had already embarked on its blatant Harry Potter knock-off, the Artemis Fowl series, when Chabon came by with his idea for something subtler, a story about a struggle to fend off the end of everything, hinging upon baseball games played in a magical parallel world. The hero is that classic figure of children's literature, the semiabandoned child. Ethan Feld is 11. His mother has died of cancer. His loving but grieving father is absorbed...
...Pulitzer Prize last year for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is a novelist who can fashion an elegant grownup story as if it were a piece of soft aluminum. But the opportunity to plunge into the burdleburple of sheer fantasy is one reason he wrote Summerland (Hyperion/Miramax; 500 pages), the kind of book that features a motherly Sasquatch, some intrepid kids, numerous giants and "werefoxes," and several cliff-hanger baseball games on which the fate of the whole world just happens to hinge, plus a giant, prognosticating clam...
...wasn't thinking about Harry Potter for a second when I wrote Summerland," Chabon insists. But he admits that "it helped pave the way. It made the idea of a children's book so much more thinkable for writers." Even when you put aside the money, what writer would not want to have J.K. Rowling's impact on the world? Because of Rowling's Harry Potter series, millions of children have decided, at least for a while, that the most important thing in their lives is not a Powerpuff Girls movie, a pro-wrestling action figure or Britney...
...Pope. Maximus V led 600,000 followers, mainly in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. He advocated closer relations with the East Orthodox Church, straining ties with Rome. DIED. FRED NEIL, 64, folk-songwriter who penned the theme song Everybody's Talkin' for the 1969 hit movie Midnight Cowboy; in Summerland Key, Florida. Neil emerged from the Greenwich Village music scene in the mid-1960s. The Florida native later founded the Dolphin Research Project to stop the trafficking and exploitation of dolphins. DIED. CHRISTL HAAS, 57, Austrian skiing champion, who won gold and silver medals in the 1964 Olympics, and the bronze...
...short time because they aren't really that good. I don't know about the other singers, but the Backstreet Boys have lasted for almost seven years, and they're doing better than ever. They have fans of all ages, not just little kids. SHANNON KARNER, age 15 Summerland...