Vincent Puglisi's decision to reject a plea bargain carrying a 30-year sentence backfired on Tuesday when a jury convicted him of first-degree murder and robbery with a deadly weapon. Now he will be sentenced to either death or life in prison for the frenzied stabbing and bludgeoning death of Alan Shalleck, 76, of Boynton Beach, who collaborated on many of the Curious George films and books. Puglisi nodded his head in agreement as each of the guilty verdicts was read.

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Shalleck was repeatedly stabbed and clobbered with a paddle in his home on Super Bowl Sunday in February 2006. Ditto used one of Shalleck's own steak knives to stab him, and it broke, Puglisi later told investigators. Then he used a second steak knife, and it broke.

"He just kept saying the son-of-a-bitch won't die," Puglisi told authorities. But Shalleck did die, and was left in his driveway inside large garbage bags "like a piece of trash outside," Assistant State Attorney Andy Slater told jurors.

Those anticipating Jon Krakauer's meditation on the nature of heroism, examined through the story of Pat Tillman, the former football star killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire, may have to wait quite a bit longer than they planned. According to Doubleday, which had The Hero scheduled for October (and planned go to press with a hefty 500,000-first-printing), Krakauer has withdrawn the title.

Krakauer is apparently unhappy with the manuscript and is holding onto it indefinitely. David Drake at Doubleday confirmed that the decision was entirely the author's and that, while the imprint is "disappointed," it supports its author. Speaking to the book's future, Drake said the situation is "a little bit wait and see" and that if the book does get rescheduled it likely wouldn't come out until at least 2009.

The triple-decker edition was inscribed on behalf of Austen to her close confidante, the governess Anne Sharp. One of only 12 presentation copies printed, which otherwise went to family members and publisher John Murray's contacts, it was the only one given to a friend of the author. Yesterday's auction at Bonhams in London was won by an anonymous British bidder, outstripping an anticipated sale price of £50-£70,000, the highest price ever paid for an Austen novel, and comfortably ahead of the £114,000 fetched by a first edition of Wuthering Heights last November.

Walters' mid-career love life is detailed largely in two chapters in the middle of the book, "Fun and Games in Washington" and "Special Men in My Life." Not all that special, or all that fun, apparently, because the audio book skips the two chapters entirely. Missing is any note of her affair with Brooke, not to mention her flings with future Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Virginia Senator John Warner and several more.

A consumer might be excused for feeling victimized by the old bait and switch, since promotional material for the book hints broadly at the romantic revelations ("Here, too, are her relationships with men - in and out of her marriages - and with her friends, co-workers and rivals," reads the Alfred A. Knopf catalog copy); the Brooke affair was the chief headline of virtually every gossip column item on the book; and Walters herself talked about it freely on shows like Oprah.

A call to Random House Audio elicited the usual reminder that abridgements must, of necessity, leave out a lot of material, and a polite passing of the buck to the author. "We had a limited time for the audio, and Barbara was instrumental in choosing what was kept in," said the spokesperson. "She had final approval over everything, and that was the version she wanted to record."

It's no surprise that Oprah Winfrey gave copies of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth to the 4,666 graduates of Stanford University when she gave the commencement address on Sunday. Now No. 8, A New Earth was No. 1 for 11 consecutive weeks on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list after Winfrey chose it as her book club pick in January. She also gave copies of Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead, $15), published in 2005. The book argues that professional and personal success in the 21st century will require traits such as empathy in addition to left-brain qualities like logic.

Though Pink has never spoken with Winfrey, he says his publisher had given him "an inkling that something was going to happen." "I was amazed, grateful and humbled," the writer from Washington, D.C., says.

A few weeks ago John Mitzel, proprietor of Calamus Books in Boston, was surprised to open his mail and discover he'd been named in a lawsuit filed by an author. The suit, filed by Larry Townsend's attorney for copyright infringement, stems from a dispute over unpaid fees allegedly owed the author by his distributor, the Oklahoma-based Nazca Plains Corp. Nonetheless, the suit charges that Mitzel, along with over 40 other booksellers (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble), infringed on Townsend's copyright by selling the author's books in his store.

[t]he Los Angeles-based Valerie F. Horn, Townsend's attorney, said that although the claim is rooted in an issue with Nazca (which is, for all intents and purposes, an individual named Herbert R. Moseley), the bookstores are legally entangled. According to Horn, Nazca, aka Moseley, copied Townsend's works without permission and then distributed the books to the booksellers. This, she said, results in "liability to all those within the chain of distribution." Horn also added that whether the booksellers named knowingly or unknowingly sold ripped-off books is irrelevant, as per the copyright statute.

According to Rowling's agent, Christopher Little, the seven Harry Potter books have so far been translated into 67 languages, amassing the 400m figure since the publication of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in 1997.

Despite the furious pace of sales, Harry Potter will still have his work cut out to catch the Bible, which, according to the Guinness Book of Records, has sold 2.5bn copies since 1815, and has been translated into 2,233 languages or dialects. Rowling would be more likely to catch Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, which has reportedly sold 900m copies, but its sales are slowing down.

Harmony Books, a Random House imprint, is scheduled to publish the LuPone autobiography in 2010. The untitled book, according to the publisher, will cover LuPone's entire life to date: "From her beginnings in Northport, Long Island, where she discovered that being onstage was the one place she couldn't get into trouble, [LuPone] takes us on the roller-coaster of professional highs ... and emotional lows."

Patti LuPone is currently enjoying what is perhaps her biggest stage success to date. For her performance as Rose in the current revival of Gypsy at the St. James Theatre, the singing actress has won the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Drama League's Distinguished Performance Award.

Academy Award-winning actress Marlee Matlin, hot off the last season of Dancing With the Stars, is working on a memoir, scheduled to come out next year. Many folks might not know this about the 42-year-old Matlin, but she's no newbie to the literary beat. She wrote a novel in 2002, Deaf Child Crossing, and two children's books, Nobody's Perfect and Leading Ladies. The tentative title for the memoir, to be published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment, a Simon & Schuster imprint: I'll Scream Later.

"As a young girl, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady who just happened to be deaf, skating down the street saying hi to everyone I knew," Matlin said in a statement issued by the publisher. "But today, as a mom of four, I'm no longer Marcia. I've morphed into Alice, the Maid. Goodbye, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia."

Matlin made a big splash in the movie world when she won the best actress Oscar for her role in the 1986 film "Children of a Lesser God," opposite William Hurt, who became her off-screen lover as well. Will she tell all? Reportedly, she will "delve into her loves and life in Hollywood" and will write about her "unresolved issues and battles with addiction and abuse, many of which she kept hidden from the public and her family."