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Tuesday at 2 p.m. (that's 5 o'clock for you New Yorkers), Jacket Copy is changing its URL to http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/. Rolls right off the tongue, right?

If you've been kind enough to subscribe to the RSS feed of Jacket Copy, you'll have to update your reader to get our headlines in the future. The new RSS feed link is http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/rss2.0.xml.

The blog formatting will look a little different, but we're still going to bring you book news and the literary latest. So please come along to our new Web home. Did you miss it? I hope not. It'll be http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/. See you there!

-- Carolyn Kellogg

As the Dark Knight descends on movie theaters this week, a new tell-all book on Christian Bale arrives. Tickets sold out at all the Batman screenings? Head on over to Barnes and Noble in Manhattan Beach on Friday, when Bale's former publicist and assistant, Harrison Cheung, will be signing copies of "Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman." Cheung, who touts himself as the real life Alfred, lived and worked with Christian and his father for 10 years: He shares firsthand accounts of family dysfunction and the actor's extreme dedication to his craft.

Looking for something a little more abstract? Check out wordsmith Laurel Airica in action as she dissectes the English language for wordplay and inspiration in our daily lives with her live presentation "WordMagic Global: Using the Word for the World's ReCreation," from 7-10 p.m. at The Great Spirits Ranch in Malibu.

As always, check with bookstores for event/venue changes or cancellations.

7/17, 8 p.m.: Chuck Palahniuk presents "Invisible Monsters Remix" a radically refashioned "director's cut" of the author's 1999 novel. Skirball Cultural Center

7/18, 7 p.m.: Jess Walter discusses and signs "Beautiful Ruins: A Novel". Book Soup

7/18, 7 p.m.: Carlos Ruiz Zafon presents and signs "The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel". All Saints Church, Pasadena

7/20, 11 a.m.: Harrison Cheung will sign copies of his book "Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman". Barnes & Noble Manhattan Beach

7/20, 7:30 p.m.: The traveling Slake show continues with a group reading from "Slake LA Issue 4: Dirt."  Vroman's

7/20, 7:30 p.m.: Paula Priamos and Dana Johnson read and sign their books "The Shyster's Daughter," and "Elsewhere, California." Skylight Books

7/21, 7-10 p.m.: Santa Monica-based linguist and author Laurel Airica presents "WordMagic Global: Using the Word for the World's ReCreation." Great Spirits Ranch Malibu

7/ 22, 1 p.m.: Cast members from "West Side Story" will be on hand to share behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the classic film detailed in their book, "Our Story: Jets and Sharks Then and Now." Barnes & Noble Calabasas

-- Liesl Bradner

Photo: Christian Bale as Batman in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures "The Dark Knight Rises." Credit: Ron Phillips / Warner Bros.

Covey's signature work was published in 1989 and became a lasting bestseller — in 1994, it had been on the New York Times bestseller list for 220 weeks. Currently its sales are tallied at more than 20 million copies. He went on to write a number of sequels and spinoffs, including "The Third Alternative" (2011) and "The Eighth Habit" (2005). He was also a sought-after management advisor.

Covey was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He got an MBA at Harvard, then returned to Utah to get a doctorate from Brigham Young University, where he taught business management.

The Salt Lake Tribune writes:

Covey’s management post at BYU led to "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which launched a second career as management guru for companies and government agencies, among them Saturn, Ritz Carlton, Proctor & Gamble, Sears Roebuck and Co., NASA, Black & Decker, Public Broadcasting Service, Amway, American Cancer Society and the Internal Revenue Service.

The books have legions of adherents in corporate America who swear by its principles. But critics tend to see it as part of a cult of the self-help American frenzy of past decades or so that tends to trivialize big problems.

Covey founded a Utah-based management training center that sold books and videos and held training seminars. In 1997 it merged with FranklinQuest, a deal from which Covey was said to have made about $27 million in cash and stock.

"We believe that organizational behavior is individual behavior collectivized," he told Fortune magazine in 1994. "We want to take this to the whole world."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Stephen R. Covey in 2003. Credit: Ric Feld / Associated Press.

"Los Angeles weather," Joan Didion wrote in her 1967 essay "Los Angeles Notebook," "is the weather of ... apocalypse," but late last week, as rain descended on the normally arid summer landscape of Southern California, it was not Didion about whom I found myself thinking, but J.G. Ballard.

Ballard, who died in 2009, is perhaps best known for investigating the erotic possibilities of violence in a world anesthetized by consumerism and conformity. Early in his career, though, he wrote a series of novels ("The Drought," "The Drowned World," "The Wind From Nowhere," "The Crystal World") that address environmental themes.

From the perspective of the present, it's tempting to call Ballard prescient — these novels all appeared in the early-to-mid-1960s — yet as Martin Amis notes in an introduction to the new 50th anniversary edition of "The Drowned World," that's something of a fixed game. "[F]ictional divination," Amis writes, "will always be hopelessly haphazard. The unfolding of world historical events is itself haphazard (and therefore unaesthetic), and 'the future' is in a sense defined by its messy inscrutability."

Here, we see many of Ballard's themes in embryo: the discontents of civilization, the intractability of the universe, the tenuous balance of the world. And yet, prescient or otherwise, he is also writing about the insignificance of humanity, which survives at the mercy of an environment that could turn against us at any time.

This is the hidden, primal fear provoked by climate change, and the reason, too, that last week's out-of-season storm felt unsettling, a sign (perhaps) of things to come.

"We should have got out years ago," Ballard writes. "All this detailed mapping of harbours for use in some hypothetical future is absurd. Even if the solar flares subside it will be ten years before there's any serious attempt to reoccupy these cities. ... The whole place is nothing but a confounded zoo."

— David L. Ulin

Photo: J.G. Ballard in 1988. Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Sobol was born in New York and served in World War II. After going to college at Oberlin, he worked as a journalist in New York, then left to pursue a writing career in 1951. Although he was having some success, his "Encyclopedia Brown" manuscript was turned down two dozen times before it found a publisher. 

The first book, "Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective" was published by T. Nelson in 1963. It proved so popular that Sobol was soon following up with more stories about the 10-year-old Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown and his partner, tomboy Sally Kimball. Eventually, there would be almost 30 books in the series, which has never gone out of print.

A fund in memory of Donald Sobol has been set up at the New York Public Library.

Sobol had moved with his wife and family from New York to Florida in 1961; the "Encyclopedia Brown" series was set in the fictional Florida town Idaville. Sobol tried to retain a measure of anonymity; he did not grant television interviews and preferred not to be photographed. "I am very content with staying in the background and letting the books do the talking," he told the Oberlin alumni magazine  in 2011.

Before "Encyclopedia Brown," Sobol had been publishing historical nonfiction aimed at children, with titles that included "The Double Quest" and "The Lost Dispatch: A Story of Antietam." He had a hit with the short column "Two Minute Mysteries," which was syndicated by newspapers from 1959-68.

Sobol, who continued writing into his 80s, used his own experience as a lesson for aspiring writers. "Persevere, and don’t take no for an answer," he said. "And if you really think [the publishers] are right, then look over the manuscript and polish it a little more."

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 -- Carolyn Kellogg

Usually, a book trailer is created and then left on its own, for overworked marketing departments or individual authors to try to push out onto the Internet, with a faint hope that it might go viral.

Could casting real actors be one way to jump-start the process and bring new eyes to book trailers? Greywolf Press is trying that tactic: Alex Karpovsky stars in the a trailer for the book "Four New Messages" by Joshua Cohen (Caveat: There is drug use and strong language in the trailer). Karpovsky is one of the young stars of the hit HBO series "Girls," in which he plays Ray, a friend of Lena Dunham's main character, Hannah.

Seems like using an actor from "Girls" might well reach a desired demographic -- young, hip cultural consumers -- more than simply using catalog-model types and overheated voiceovers. That's what can be found in some book trailers produced in Hollywood, where one company spends about $50,000 a pop to make book trailers for major publishing houses like St. Martin's and Random House.

Greywolf, an independent based in Minnesota, seems to be coming at things from a different direction, more Sundance than blockbuster. The book trailer above is called "Emission," and it's described as a short film based on a section of "Four New Messages" by Cohen.

In the trailer, Karpovsky plays a drug dealer whose actions are told by a girl at a laptop, smoking. We hear her voiceover reading what she types, and the secondhandness of the storytelling creates an uneasy sense that the narrator is not to be trusted. Or maybe that's the mood of the trailer, with music mixed with talk radio rants, and dark backgrounds filling with smoke.

Joshua Cohen is the author of the 800-plus page novel "Witz," published by Dalkey Archive Press. "Four New Messages" will be his first book since it landed, with a thump, in 2010.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Alex Karpovsky in a screenshot from the trailer for the book "Four New Messages" by Joshua Cohen.

To back up: Literary Death Match is an antic reading series with heavy doses of competition and comedy. It's orchestrated by host and creator Todd Zuniga, a cheerleader in a lounge lizard getup, who guides four readers, a trio of judges, and the audience through an evening that might end, as last night's did, by shooting Silly String at a poster of T.C. Boyle.

The readers are paired off randomly after the event starts. Only one victor will be declared from each pair, and they'll face off in a final round that has nothing to do with books -- another finale featured a cupcake toss. The first part, however, is fairly literary.

Both readers in the first pair read from their work, and the judges evaluate them on a) literary merit, b) performance, and c) intangibles. Last night, Henry Rollins -- punk rock singer, author, DJ, and performance artist -- was the literary merit judge, actress Tig Notaro judged performance, and comedian Rob Delaney covered intangibles. It's usually a comedian who intagible-izes, riffing, and this is a good thing -- particularly to those who've been to a lot of standard dry bookstore readings. Which this is not.

Last night, the first match was between Tupelo Hassman (author of "Girlchild," published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) and Rex Pickett, author of the book "Sideways," on which the Oscar-winning movie was based. In keeping with the tone of the event, the judging was fairly loopy, commenting on Hassman's tattoo and asking Pickett about Xanax. It was Hassman who was advanced to the next round (that of the Silly String).

Although usually there are breaks between rounds for drinking and mingling, the event, held for the first time at the Hammer Museum, ran straight through. Up next were Jeanne Darst, author of the memoir "Fiction Ruined My Family," and Javon Johnson, a playwright and postdoctoral teaching fellow at USC who has appeared on Def Poetry Jam. Reading from a hardcover copy of her book, Darst began with a literary-focused excerpt and ran out of time as she started a passage about an explicit sex act. Johnson, empty-handed, stepped up to the mic and with little introduction read two long poems, one about women and religion, the other about teaching his nephew lessons about culture and race.

Declining to give a verdict on the literary merit of Johnson's work, Rollins said that performance is "not about how it's assembled -- it's about how it hunts and kills." That was a particularly Rollins-style idea, not to say delicious turn of phrase, framing speaking words to an audience as a lethal pursuit. And since, as a performer, Johnson had killed, it seemed like Rollins might congratulate him for his success. Instead, he backed off making any judgment at all, saying that he didn't see how he could comment on performance's literary merit.

"Last night Henry Rollins told me contemporary spoken word poetry is not literature," Johnson tweeted Thursday morning.

That was how his decision came across. And it seemed like such an odd thing for Rollins in particular, who has recorded spoken word albums and regularly takes the stage as performer. Several conversations I had after, all off the record, focused on the unusual gap between Rollins' public work and his stance that seemed to claim that kind of work doesn't have merit.

I can say by experience it's not easy being a literary judge at LDM. It's not sporting to say negative things about the work a writer has just read; when I did it, I tried to find a way to be honest, critical and playful all at once, in the moment. Rollins' reluctance to pass literary judgment may have been the nicest way he could find to comment on the work.

Up next, judge Notaro made a peace offering to Johnson. "You could have been holding a blank sketch pad and you," she gestured to Rollins, "wouldn't know." Nevertheless, it was Darst who advanced, and became the eventual winner of Literary Death Match L.A. No. 11, after a silly battle with Silly String.  

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: From left, Rob Delaney, Tig Notaro and Henry Rollins judging Wednesday night. Credit: Literary Death Match

When Harvey Pekar died, two years ago today, at the age of 70, he left behind a contradictory legacy. On the one hand, his "American Splendor" remains one of the most compelling and transformative series in the history of comics: autobiographical slices of life in which Pekar wrestles with his job as a VA file clerk, with his mania for collecting, with the city of Cleveland -- where he was born and where he died -- and perhaps most significantly, with himself.

This is not to say "American Splendor" is self-absorbed, except it is -- in the best and most interesting of ways. When Pekar's on his game, he's like a street corner Samuel Beckett, pondering the absurdity of existence while embracing, in his own curmudgeonly fashion, all the struggles it entails.

I've written before about "Hypothetical Quandary," in which, over the course of three brief pages, he frames a Sunday morning trip to the bakery as an existential meditation, moving from the futility of his own striving and obsession to the sustaining, if fleeting, aroma of fresh bread. As with many of Pekar's stories, almost nothing happens, and yet something important is resolved.

For all that, Pekar spent the last few years of his career focusing on a different sort of story: piece work ranging from graphic histories of the Beats and Students for a Democratic Society to a comics adaptation of Studs Terkel's "Working." I can't say I blame him; he was always short of money, and after a lifetime as a cult hero, the 2003 film adaptation of "American Splendor" opened up a lot of opportunities. At the same time, there's something flat about such efforts, as if Pekar were going through the motions.

Both of these conflicting impulses -- that of the engaged autobiographer and of the freelancer fulfilling an assignment -- emerge in Pekar's final graphic memoir, "Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me." It's an interesting book, if a bit schizophrenic, melding Pekar's lifelong internal debate about his Jewishness and more specifically the state of Israel, with a capsule history of the Jews.

If that sounds a little meta, it is, although in a refreshingly down-to-earth way. What better strategy for framing the tension between personal and global than by tracing Pekar's own attempts to do so within the context of his life and work? Raised by Zionist parents (one a Marxist, the other a devout Jew), he wrestled with these issues from adolescence, until they became a matter of identity. And yet, Pekar ultimately did not identify with Israel -- at least, not with the nation Israel has become.

"I'm ... tired," he declares, by way of explanation, "of people saying I'm a self-hating Jew because I'm critical of Israel. ... I do not hate myself. And Jews who criticize Israel aren't necessarily mentally ill." It's an excellent point -- one with which, as a Jew, I entirely agree -- and it returns the issue of Jewish sovereignty, of Jewish survival, to the most individual perspective, which is, of course, where Pekar excelled.

Less successful are the historical sections, which trace the saga of Jewish life from Abraham to the present day. Here, Pekar works almost entirely by the numbers, tracing in broad strokes the destruction of the Second Temple, La Conviviencia and the Expulsion, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel. If you don't know all this already, Pekar doesn't tell you very much, and if do, his version is a redundant sketch. It would have been better, I think, to avoid the history altogether and zero in on the personal.

As to why Pekar didn't do this, perhaps he felt such a story required a wider filter. Or maybe all those late-life projects rubbed off on his storytelling style. (Similar problems afflict another posthumous work, "Harvey Pekar's Cleveland," which came out earlier this year.)

Either way, "Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me" is ultimately more emblematic of Pekar's bifurcation as an artist that it is of his conflict as a Jew. That's too bad, because his message here is important -- that a good Jew asks tough questions, that a history of oppression requires us to be more conscious of the oppressed.

"Jews oppressing others just to survive seems dicey," Pekar argues in the final pages. "I know that we Jews have been the most viciously persecuted ethnic group to survive. ... But the Palestinian Arabs are not going anywhere. Their ancestors lived on the same land. They still live in Palestine. And as long as they do, they will fight for independence, and there will be ceaseless conflict."

-- David L. Ulin

Photo: Harvey Pekar. Credit: HBO Films

HarperCollins will publish three middle-grade books -- "middle grade" refers to books for children ages  8-12 -- by Gaiman. One will be a sequel to 2009's "Odd and the Frost Giants," based on Norse mythology. One is as yet unannounced; the other is tentatively titled "Fortunately, the Milk," and will feature art by Skottie Young.

Gaiman is also creating two picture books for the publisher, both featuring Chu, a little panda with a big sneeze. The first, "Chu's Day," will be published in January 2013. Gaiman, who has an active Internet presence, posted an image of Chu online in February.

Always prolific, Gaiman has a book for adults on deck, tentatively titled "Lettie Hempstock's Ocean." In June he wrote on his blog:

On the plane to the UK I finished writing the new novel. I'm not sure right now if it's going to be called Lettie Hempstock's Ocean or not. I think it's a good book -- or at least, I think it's a real book, and I'm proud of it, and whether it's good or not will be up to other people to judge. Despite the protagonist being about 7 years old for most of the novel, it's a book for adults. Or at least, I think it is.

Now I'm doing things to it, including worrying that there's a better title and rereading it and making it better and clearer and scarier wherever I can. But it's a new book for adults, one I didn't even know I would write until February, and it makes me happy that it exists.

Gaiman has had success writing for all ages. He won the prestigious Newbery Award for "The Graveyard Book" (ages 10 and up), as well as winning Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards for "American Gods," a novel for adults. "The Sandman" graphic novel series also brought a number of awards Gaiman's way.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Neil Gaiman with wife Amanda Palmer. Credit: Pixie Vision Productions