Looking for another steamy read now that you’ve finished Fifty Shades of Grey? You’re in luck! Cosmopolitan magazine and Harlequin have joined forces to publish Red Hot Reads, a series of short e-books designed to satisfy your inner romantic (and inner freak).

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Fifty Shades of Grey may be a best seller, but it’s also the book British readers are most likely to leave behind. Travelodge, a budge hotet chain in the UK, has recovered around 7,000 copies of the erotic thriller from its rooms, earning the novel the dubious distinction of most discarded book. However, Fifty Shades Freed and Fifty Shades Darker fared little better.

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Interested in voice work? Here’s a project that comes around once in a lifetime. Audible Productions is holding open auditions for the role of Helen Gurley Brown, the noted Cosmopolitan editor who died earlier this month. The selected actor will voice Brown in an audio book adaptation of her iconic sixties work, Sex and the Single Girl. 

“It’s the most radical work Helen Gurley Brown ever published,” Audible.com podcast host Susie Bright said in a statement. “The right actor, with the right sass and wit, will make Helen’s voice even more captivating.”

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It’s been over a year since a team of Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout and killed the infamous terrorist. Now, a new book will describe exactly what happened that fateful morning in May.

Penned by a former member of Navy SEAL Team 6, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden is slated for release on September 11 and will be an “essential piece of modern history.” The anonymous author, listed under the pseudonym Mark Owen, was a team leader in the operation that took down Osama bin Laden and his book will give a “blow-by blow narrative of the assault, beginning with the helicopter crash that could have ended his life straight through to the radio call confirming Bin Laden’s death.”

Publisher Dutton, an imprint of Penguin, believes it will have a major best seller on its hands and has ordered 300,000 copies for the first print run. If the book is as successful as Dutton imagines, it could have an impact on the presidential election this November. A film about the historic raid, Zero Dark Thirty, was originally scheduled to premiere this October but the studio pushed it back to December after Republicans complained it glorified Obama’s biggest achievement right before the election. It’s easy to see who No Easy Day might receive the same sort of criticism.

In case your memory is a bit rusty, a team of Navy SEALs and CIA operatives invaded Osama bin Laden’s hideout on May 2, 2011, killing the man on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists lists. He was 54 years old.

Source/Photo: NYTimes.com

Happy birthday J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter! Today, Rowling celebrates her 47^th birthday, while her beloved fictional character, Harry Potter, turns 32. Where does the time go?

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling was born in Yate, Gloucestershire, England on July 31, 1965. She was a bright and curious child, and began penning fantasy stories at a young age. In fact, Rowling loosely based the character of Hermione on herself, saying “she's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of.”

Rowling’s adult years were a bit rocky at first - her mother died, she and her husband divorced, and she found herself an unemployed mother on government assistance. However, Rowling refused to give up on her writing and finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1995.

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Good news for Stephen King fans! The “Master of Horror” and novelist Stewart O’Nan have teamed up to write A Face in the Crowd, a chilling new e-book set for release August 21. It will be the duo’s second baseball-themed collaboration.

Here’s the plot summary from StephenKing.com:

“Dean Evers, an elderly widower, sits in front of the television with nothing better to do than waste his leftover evenings watching baseball. It’s Rays/Mariners, and David Price is breezing through the line-up. Suddenly, in a seat a few rows up beyond the batter, Evers sees the face of someone from decades past, someone who shouldn’t be at the ballgame, shouldn’t be on the planet. And so begins a parade of people from Evers’s past, all of them occupying that seat behind home plate. Until one day Dean Evers sees someone even eerier...”

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