Film verison of Life of Pi proposed; Tolkien work to be published

Film director Ang Lee is in talks to produce a film version of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, according to Variety . . . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has acquired the rights to an unpublished work written by J.R.R. Tolkien and has plans to release it on May 5, Publisher's Weekly reports. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun was written when Tolkien was a professor at Oxford in the '20s and '30s. It's an English retelling in narrative verse of some epic Norse tales . . . HarperCollins said in a release that it had acquired a biography of John Updike, to be written by Adam Begley, the books editor of The New York Observer.