Literary news

STATE

Relief for bathroom users

CINCINNATI — Roto-Rooter, America’s largest plumbing and drain cleaning service provider, is teaming up with the SciFi Channel’s “The Ghost Hunters” to bring some relief to bathroom users everywhere.

“Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat” is a vignette-style bathroom reader filled with strange-but-true tales of plumbing horrors and hilarity encountered by real Roto-Rooter plumbers and “Ghost Hunters” Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes.

Also included are practical tips, advice and what-not-to do’s for do-it-yourselfers, toilet trivia and a foreword by the Porcelain God himself.

“Porcelain Seat” is available for purchase at www.chillytales.com. Visitors to the site also may enter Roto-Rooter’s “Chilling Tales Sweepstakes” for a chance to win a variety of prizes, including a trip to Colorado, where the winner will join “The Ghost Hunters” on a ghost hunt at the Stanley Hotel (location for the filming of the movie “The Shining”) or a stay at the haunted Spaulding Inn of New Hampshire, owned and operated by Grant and Hawes.

Awards

Lifetime achievement

NEW YORK — Historian Gerhard L. Weinberg has received a $100,000 lifetime achievement prize for excellence in military writing.

The Pritzker Military Library Literature Award, founded in 2007, honors writers who have “profoundly enriched the public understanding of American military history,” prize officials said.

Weinberg, 81, has written books on World War II, including “A World at Arms” and “World in the Balance.” The award is sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation.

Book Deals

Books by Martin Luther King Jr. to be republished

ATLANTA — Four books that have been long out of print by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. will be published again under a deal with Beacon Press brokered by King’s youngest son, Dexter King, chairman of his father’s estate.

Beacon, a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association, publishes books on social justice, human rights and racial equality.

The four works, which have been unavailable for nearly two decades, will be released on Jan. 18, 2010 — the federal holiday observing what would have been King’s 80th birthday.

They include:

U“Stride Toward Freedom” (1958) King’s memoir of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.

U“Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” (1967), his last book/an analysis of American race relations and the movement after a decade of U.S. civil rights struggles.

U“Trumpet of Conscience” (1968), a collection of five lectures given in 1967.

U“Strength to Love” (1963), a volume of his most well-known homilies and the book found in his briefcase when he was killed on April 4, 1968.

Vindicator wire services