This August, as we prepare to unleash a bunch of incredible books into the world, MobyLives will be taking a bit of a breather. We’ll still post the occasional news item or feature, but for most of this month we’ll be posting a roundup like this every morning. We will, of course, remain active on Twitter and Facebook. We hope you have a great August, and that you’ll keep checking in with us!

• J.R.R. Tolkien is the new Harper Lee, The Story of Kullervo is the new Go Set A Watchman, and HarperCollins is still HarperCollins. The first standalone edition of Tolkien’s unfinished retelling of a Finnish myth will drop in late August. (Maybe Thor is the new Tonja Carter?) (The Bookseller)
• Speaking of Lee, a YA book about her childhood friendship with Truman Capote is dropping soon. My YA book about their later lives, Two Old Drunks Who Hate Each Other is still looking for a publisher. (The Guardian)
• A Russian publisher has released a number of books about Vladimir Putin under the names of various Western journalists, including The Guardian‘s Luke Harding. I love everything about this story. (The Guardian)
• Martin Scorcese and Leonardo DiCaprio are teaming up again, this time to film Erik Larson’s 2003 bestseller, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America. DiCaprio will play Dr. HH Holmes, a serial killer who terrorized young, single women during the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. (Deadline)
• Ernest Cline, author of the bestsellers Ready, Player One and, more recently, Armada, has just signed a massive deal for his next book. Crown Publishing has bought the rights to Cline’s book (the title and content of which are a closely guarded secret) for somewhere in the low-to-mid seven figures. (Entertainment Weekly) 
• More proof that Shakespeare definitely blazed the weed all the time. (The Daily Dot)
• 30 novelists and poets—among them Neil Gaiman, Téa Obreht, and Ben Lerner—respond to a selection of the more than 100 pieces of contemporary artwork featured in the Guggenheim’s “Storylines” exhibition: “Engaging the rich historical relationship between literature and art, the resulting polyphony signals the diverse interpretive potential that lies within each object on display.” (Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim)
• “Parents want to deny it. Your friends want to egg it on. Authorities want to control it. The media want to capitalize on it.” Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about puberty (in books). (Slate)

Today’s excerpt from Future Days: 

Diedrich Diederichsen, formerly of the German magazine Sounds, is also a little wary of overpraising groups like Can and Kraftwerk, particularly for their vaunted links with the art world, links he believes are overstated. ‘I think that there is a certain sensibility in Düsseldorf, for example, [that] informed what Kraftwerk was doing at a certain period, but they were not really close to the real art world, they were not close to the debates, they were not there. It was more like a superficial relation because they went, maybe, to the same bars.’

However, he does suggest that one difficulty in West Germany was the lack of a major music press, or lack of interest in any such thing, that would provide a framework, a discourse for the new music. Sounds was one such paper, ambitious in its aesthetic scope, and apposite for the new German music. It was named after a remark by Albert Ayler that the future of music would no longer be about notes, it would be about sounds. However, its influence was limited by comparison with the UK press.

‘I remember when I started to write for German music papers in the late seventies that there were journalists of importance in the UK press. Then, Germany sold almost as many records as the British, in certain periods even more, but issues of music magazines sold were far fewer. Sounds was extremely small – the bestsold issue was forty-three thousand copies. And that was a very good month. So in Germany there was obviously a huge market of people who were buying music, but were not buying any information about the music. It was not the same in Britain, with magazines like NME, Melody Maker.’

The Bremen DJ and co-founder of the German TV show The Beat Club Gerhard Augustin recalled in a Eurock interview in 2002 how hard it was for underground groups. ‘For new groups without a hit single it was very hard. Some of the old Nazis were still in control of the media so they would never give exposure to new experimental rock music.’ And yet it was Augustin who was instrumental in the signing of groups like Amon Düül 2 and Can to Liberty/United Artists. The ‘Altnazi’ infl uence wasn’t so strong as to prevent non-commercial Krautrock groups from being signed to major labels, perhaps precisely because of the culture gap between the out-of-touch executives and the music itself. It’s quite astonishing that despite demo tapes of sheer, unabashed extremism, they were nonetheless signed to major German labels, with high hopes even entertained of Faust that they might cause a Beatles-style sensation. While Germans may never really have taken Krautrock as fully to heart as the rest of the world, its institutional postwar tolerance meant that the music was at least able to attain crucial footholds in its country of origin.

In the UK, meanwhile, a handful of journalists, bored with the increasingly leaden state of British rock in the 1970s, more frills than thrills, began to take notice of what was happening in Germany. Ian MacDonald at the NME was one, though he would later retract some of his praise and deplore the excess of drug taking that he felt clouded over some of the music. Richard Williams, then a writer at Melody Maker, was another. ‘I came back from Berlin with all these albums – Phallus Dei by Amon Düül, Can – a whole pile of them. It was obvious that something interesting was happening. It sounded as if it was people who had heard Terry Riley, Velvets, free jazz. Nobody here at that time was infl uenced by the Velvet Underground – not until Roxy and Bowie. There was a darker side, drones and a sense of timelessness in the music, which they seemed to have a handle on. Quite a lot of them sounded as if they had studied with Stockhausen, even if they hadn’t, which was very different from, say, Keith Emerson. That was refreshing to me because I hated prog with a passion, which set up some interesting tensions with me and Melody Maker writers like Chris Welch.

‘For me, Nico was one of those who helped establish a founding mood. I loved the thing she added to what they were doing. She helped established this idea of coldness, which is quite important in all of this. Darkness and coldness nowadays have come to be seen as essential constituents of rock music. Well, for a long time, there was no darkness, there was no coldness. Everything was sunshine and optimism. You had sad songs but they were sad love songs. And then came this new wave of German music.’

As early as 1970, Williams reviewed Can’s Monster Movie, and while he would doubtless not care to have every word quoted back many years on (‘Mooney, a Negro, doesn’t have a particularly powerful voice, but his wailing and screaming fits perfectly where a less reticent singer would obtrude’) and while unable to hazard as yet an overall sense of why German music was emerging at this stage as a collective force, it’s a prescient and shrewd analysis of the group’s fundamental rearrangement of the rock elements, concluding simply, ‘Nobody in Britain is playing this kind of music, which is well worth hearing.’

Needless to say, a penchant for German rock set Williams up for some philistine ribaldry from his office colleagues. ‘Oh yes, absolutely. People didn’t like experiments that went off on a tangent from the prog evolution.’ Goose-stepping, combs pressed under noses and straplines fi lled with Achtungs!, Panzer and Luftwaffe references were all part of the merriment. ‘You can tie that in with the Goons and Monty Python and sub-editors competing to get in with the most ludicrous puns.’ Priceless examples of this tendency included the following straplines: ‘Can: Ve Give Ze Orders Here’ (interview by Nick Kent, NME, February 1974); ‘Can: They Have Ways of Making You Listen . . .’ (profile by Ian MacDonald, NME, November 1974); and ‘Kraftwerk: The Final Solution to the Music Problem?’ (interview by Lester Bangs, NME, September 1975, which was printed on a backdrop of an image of a Nuremberg rally). This tendency persisted, with almost calamitous consequences, into my own era as a Melody Maker journalist. Had I not spotted it at the last minute and hauled it from the presses, a 1990s Kraftwerk feature of mine would have appeared rejoicing under the headline ‘STRENGTH THROUGH JOY’.