Book News: Anger Over 'Superman' Author Who Condemns Homosexuality

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• DC Comics has tapped Orson Scott Card, the Ender's Game author who has said homosexuality is "deviant behavior," to write for its new, digital-first Superman. That has sparked outrage among fans. Card also suggested in a 2004 essay that if same-sex marriage is legalized, "our civilization will collapse or fade away."
• Eric Carle, the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, is coming out with a new book this fall.
• A school in Brooklyn will be named after Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak.
• "The only items there truly unfamiliar to me were two wire racks full of paperbacks, their covers each backlit with the golden glow of God's everlasting presence and bucolic perfection: wheat fields, corn fields, rivers and barns beneath cerulean or honey skies. A plain-clothed woman in some state of muted emotional duress gazed into the middle distance beneath her white bonnet. I spun through the racks, elated, repulsed. Could there be anything better, or worse, than Amish romance novels?" — Rachel Yoder, on Amish romance novels.
• Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak makes emergency parking announcements with poetry: "Since this is the week/To say je t'aime/Move her car off the even side/By 8 a.m./(Plowing on even side starts at 8 am)."
• Morning Edition's Renee Montagne interviews John Borling, an Air Force fighter pilot and prisoner of war in Vietnam who spent more than six years in a North Vietnamese prison composing poetry without paper or pencils. He says the resulting book of poetry is a testament to "power of the unwritten word."

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