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To promote the release of King of Limbs, Radiohead has been giving out free copies of a one-time newspaper around the world.

The paper includes stories by Robert Macfarlane, Jay Griffiths, and Stanley Donwood. On Tuesday, March 29th, the paper will be given out at select locations in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City and many other locations. We’ve included the NYC giveaway points below.

Here’s more from the site: “To commemorate this momentous occasion, Radiohead have produced a newspaper which will be given away, free, gratis, without cost to the consumer by accredited vendors from a multitude of locations WORLDWIDE! In the USA, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, Poland, Germany, Austria, in the Czech Republic, in Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Ireland, France, Italy, Slovakia, Finland, Greece, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Hungary, Australia, Latvia, Iceland, Romania, New Zealand, the UK and a load of other places around the globe, our dedicated teams of newspaper delivery people will be handing out copies of THE UNIVERSAL SIGH to anyone who wants one, until we run out!”

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Literary Agent Bill Clegg's new addiction memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, has been the talk of the town for weeks now. This isn't the first time Clegg has been in the spotlight, and his confessional book didn't exactly come out of nowhere. So in order to make sense of Clegg's publicity blitz, we've put together a brief dossier on the buildup of newsworthiness.

It's 2005, and Clegg represents some big names in fiction, like Nicole Krauss and Susan Choi, through his boutique agency Burnes & Clegg. Then he disappears. He loses his clients. Then he returns to the scene, signs on as an agent with William Morris Agency, and gets most of them back. In 2008, Clegg sells a book, the book in question, to Little, Brown for a reported $350,000. The book comes out. Clegg and his publisher decide to focus on "getting as many major national profiles, features and reviews as possible, rather than personal appearances." New York Magazine scores the first excerpt, and runs it with great pictures. The Guardian excerpts it, too. Everybody loves it. The New York Times calls it "a mesmerizing bummer." Then they excerpt the first chapter.

And that's why you're hearing so much about him. His book excerpts well and he seems preternaturally good at taking headshots (see picture). And, yes: it's really, really good.

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Alan Goldsher has sold the film rights to his forthcoming zombie-Beatles novel, Paul is Undead: The British Zombie invasion, due out in June by Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster.

The book, which got a ton of press when it was announced last year after people realized Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was awesome, is an oral history of the undead Fab Four, who are trying to, ahem, "escape eternal death at the hands of England's greatest zombie hunter, Mick Jagger."

Double Feature Films, the company run by the producers of Pulp Fiction and Erin Brockovich, bought the rights. Earlier this year, Goldsher gave GalleyCat some publishing predictions.

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Inside Higher Ed has a fun little profile up about Glass Wave, a California band made up of professors who sing about literature. The band is pictured above, via their site)

From the story: "Inspired by a line in Ezra Pound's Cantos, the band's moniker is consistent with its modus operandi: writing rock songs based on canonical works of literature. The 11-track album adapts themes and narratives from Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Vladimir Nabokov, and sets them to musical compositions, generally in the vein of 1960s and '70s progressive rock typified by groups such as Pink Floyd, The Soft Machine, and Supertramp."

Well, that's awesome. Maybe they'll end up touring with the Rock Bottom Remainders. Or at least sign to their record label.

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After another rough-and-tumble year, only one thing kept this GalleyCat editor writing, day after day. Music.

As the new year approaches, we like ask our readers: What music did you listen to while writing this year? Which songs, albums, or artists kept you cheerful despite the hard times and inevitable cases of writer's block?

Then email GalleyCat your nominations for the best writing music from 2009, and feel free to include your reasons why in the email. We'll publish your list before the new year dawns. It's going to be a long, cold winter, and we will all need some great music to keep writing.

After the jump, this GalleyCat editor compiled a list of his favorite writing songs from 2009--a special mix of literary rock & roll. Click here for an iTunes version. If you need more inspiration, Largehearted Boy annually aggregates the best music lists.

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The music streaming website Pandora counted 40 million registered users this year. The free service generates a customized radio station for every band in a musical database, playing similar-sounding music in an uninterrupted stream. This continuous stream of similar-sounding music is perfect for the extended focus of a writer.

What are your favorite Pandora stations for writing? This GalleyCat editor prefers listening to the stations created for Explosions in the Sky and Cloud Cult to maximize his writing focus.

Here's more about the music selection process, from the site: "We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or 'genes' into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like."

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To celebrate the release of Decibel magazine's DaCapo anthology, "Precious Metal," the LA Times has collected some heavy metal memories from rock journalists around the country--an oral history of this strange genre of American rock.

The collection includes the stories behind such classic metal albums as Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" and Slayer's "Reign in Blood." In the article, rock reporters reminisce about heavy metal dinners, drug abuse, and satanism.

Here's rock journalist Adem Tepedelen with an anti-climactic memory: "[I arranged] an interview with Mercyful Fate on their first U.S. tour in late 1984 ... lead vocalist King Diamond['s] stage get-up at the time featured corpse paint and an upside down cross painted on his forehead. He also used a microphone holder reportedly made from human thigh bones to screech lyrics largely about Satan and other occult-themed topics ... The things that I remember most vividly to this day are how blue his eyes were, how well he spoke English and how smart and how nice he was. Which I gotta admit, at the time, was a little disappointing."

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Rock & roll frontman and novelist Chris Eaton will launch a Twitter publishing experiment on July 4th--intertwining his rock & roll tour with Rock Plaza Central, microblogging, and his writing career.

While touring with his folk/rock band, Eaton will publish 21 Twitter stories--encouraging readers to contribute their own twists and turns to the story on Twitter. The collaborative results will be published in Steel Bananas' upcoming anthology GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose, a Tightrope Books release.

Here's more from the article: "Anyone who follows Chris's Rock Plaza tweet is also asked to reply to any story with one of their own, using the rhizome model to intertwine the two stories so that they both are a part of each other. The story need not follow the original in theme. All that is asked is that replies should contain 1/3 of the words from the original text."

Over at DoubleX, cultural critic Katie Roiphe analyzed the bestselling genre of the stripper memoir, an unromantic look at a titillating bookshelf.

The essay outlines nine conventions that play out over and over in these books, perhaps laying the groundwork for a theoretical better stripper memoir. Among others, the essay looks at Diablo Cody's "Candy Girl," Ruth Fowler's "Girl, Undressed," and Lacey Lane's "Confessions Of A Stripper."

Here's a sample: "It is puzzling that such promising and prurient subject matter would lead to such flat books. This stylized form of sexuality seems to lend itself to cliche. In all of these memoirs, there is something false in the revelation and mechanical in the execution, that is--if we take the word of these bored and jaded ladies--something like stripping itself." (Via Raquelita)

Rock star Iggy Pop's new album was directly inspired by Michel Houellebecq's novel, "The Possibility of an Island."

The former lead singer of The Stooges released "Preliminaires" this week, a jazz and rock infused album. According to Google News, the singer was approached to write music for a documentary about the French novel, and the project evolved into a solo album.

Here are Iggy Pop's thoughts, from the article: "Literature's like coke and music's like heroin! Literature sharpens the mind, music stupidifies ... The book had soul and at the same time it showed great skills in just calmly illustrating some things that were inside my mind about sex, death and the opposite gender." (Via Maud Newton)

On Friday night, memoirist Chris Campion brought his band out for a book party, turning the "Escape from Bellevue" launch into a rock show at 92YTribeca.

GalleyCat went backstage, getting some book publicity tips from Campion, who also works as the lead singer of the Knockout Drops. After the reading, the whole band joined Campion on stage, going electric for a sold-out audience.

Here's more from the release: "[Campion] masterfully shares stories from growing up in an Irish-Catholic household on Long Island, to a very interesting college experience at "Vanillanova," and captures the squalor and rolling bacchanal that was the Knockout Drops' world."

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With all the bad news arriving today, GalleyCat decided to pass along a little writing music.

Last week we asked, "What music kept your writing in 2008?" GalleyCat readers responded with pages and pages of music lists. Styles ranged from rock & roll to classical, and everybody had a different set of favorites.

For your listening pleasure, here is the first batch of GalleyCat readers' favorite music. If you need more links and inspiration, be sure to check out Largehearted Boy's extensive music and literary coverage.

Novelist JT Ellison wrote: "I wouldn't have been able to finish my 4th book, Edge of Black, without three songs from Evanescence -- Come Find Me, Bring Me To Life, and Call Me When You're Sober, plus Broken, by Tift Merritt. Amazing how a song can make or break a novel."

Terena Scott choose a different kind of music: "Whenever I'm working on a particularly difficult piece, I listen to the soundtrack to 'Chocolate.'"

Barbara Caridad Ferrer wrote:
"First off, ALL of Jason Mraz's We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things, but if I was forced to pick one or two songs, it would have to be either 'Butterfly' (Come on, he wrote a song for a stripper to perform to and wrote it about a relationship WITH a stripper-- freakin' brilliant) or 'Lucky' just because it's a beautiful, sweet duet."

Many, many more songs after the jump...

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Want to get Slash to read your book? Here's how Tony O'Neill, the author of the forthcoming Down and Out on Murder Mile, tipped the scales in his favor when he and his wife, Vanessa, ran into the Guns'n'Roses guitarist at the autographing tables of last month's BookExpo America: He reported that the book has "a lot of dope and fucking in it." (Slash's reaction: "Cool!")

O'Neill's extensive BookExpo field report gets plenty more NSFW from there, graphically so when Ron Jeremy drags the couple away from the official HarperCollins party and takes them to a house in the Valley...

(I'm not kidding about the pictures; if you don't have your own office, think very carefully before following the link.)

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So, I've got CNN Headline News on in the background (Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares is over) and my ears pick up when I hear the words: "Controversy. Children's Book. Marijuana." Well, sounds like book news to me. Turns out Ricardo Cortes, director of Magic Propaganda Mill has self-published It's Just a Plant, "an illustrated children's book about marijuana" that is "a book for parents who want to educate their children about the complexities of pot in a thoughtful, fact-oriented manner." Seems to me that this could be a gateway book to harder subjects, like "it's just a needle" (Trainspotting), or, gasp, faux memoirs about drug abuse and rehab (cough: Frey).

I reached out to the best expert I could on the subject of reefer and literature, none other than Mike Edison, former publisher of High Times and author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go (BTW, I can't wait to go to that book launch party next week!) to see what he thought of "the ganja" as a suitable subject for a picture book.

The book's premise stinks worse than Snoop Dogg's last record - little kids catching mommy and daddy in the act of getting stoned? If you can't get stoned without getting busted by your six-year old, you should have you bong taken away. I am all for education, but there is something seriously wrong about teaching first-graders about weed. What's next, Fisher Price's "My First Water Pipe"? The whole thing sounds like some vast stoner conspiracy to increase the flagging circulation of anachronistic marijuana magazines. Either that or Bill O'Reilly created it so he'd have something new to scream about. What someone should really write is a dumbed-down book for gullible parents who've been conned by corrupt pharmaceutical companies to keep their kids high on behavior-modification drugs.

Mike should know what is and what's not appropriate, especially with the subtitle to his book being "Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World."

As a side note, what I love is how Headline News paired this story with the new White House report on dope use and mental illness and the story about the teens who (in this great headline) Dig Up Skull For Pot 'Bong'.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media