Ayelet Waldman has a piece in this issue of New York Magazine bashing Britney Spears and other bad mommies.

“Lately, Britney Spears has stepped up as our reigning bogeymama—her rap sheet long and varied and featuring, most recently, a standoff with the police and a stay in the psych ward,” Waldman writes. “She’s a Bad Mother; no worse, perhaps, than her own mother, whose publisher wisely shelved plans for her parenting memoir after 16-year-old Jamie Lynn announced that she’d just been jumped into the Bad Mother gang.”

Rawson Marshall Thurber, the director behind the up-coming screen adaptation of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, defended changes he made in the story in a new interview with The Advocate.

“My real goal was to make a film that felt like the novel did to me, and I think I’ve done that,” he said.

Thurber took significant liberties with the book, eliminating the character of Arthur, making Cleveland bisexual and romantically linked to the main character, Art, and cutting the role of Phlox to that of a minor character. Online, many fans of the book have bashed the changes, and anti-Mysteries MySpace pages are easy to find. But Thurber says he made the changes with Michael Chabon’s blessing.

“I knew what I wanted to do, and I told him, ‘I’ve got a pretty radical take on it, and if you’re at all interested, let me do a five-or six-page treatment. If you’re interested in that, let’s go do it, and if you’re not, please say so, and I’m a big fan and I can’t wait to read the next thing,'” Thurber said. “I wrote it up and sent if off, and I never thought he would say yes, actually, but then he read it and he sent me an e-mail back saying, ‘It’s great — let’s do it.'”

For more, check out the interview. Mysteries of Pittsburgh premiers at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 20.

Michael Chabon’s first non-fiction book, Maps and Legends, will hit stores this spring.

Published by McSweeney’s, the 200-page book, according to Chabon, “is a collection of writings on reading and writing, many but not all of them previously published, most of them retooled and shaped, hopefully, into a thematically unified whole.”

McSweeney’s is touting it as Chabon’s first nonfiction book. It is not to be confused with a previously announced, untitled nonfiction essay collection on what it’s like being a man in terms of being a son. That book is expected in spring 2009 from HarperCollins.

Maps & Legends, according to McSweeney’s, features 16 essays “in praise of reading and writing.”

“Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around “serious” literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection,” McSweeney’s says.

Though exactly which stories are available isn’t known, it is possible to guess on some thanks to McSweeney’s synopsis, as some fans did at Wikipedia. According to them, the book likely includes:

– “Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts,” from Harper’s Magazine in October 1997.

– “The Recipe for Life,” from The Washington Book World in 2000.

– “Maps and Legends,” from Architectural Digest in April 2001.

– “Inventing Sherlock Holmes,” from The New York Review of Books on February 10, 2005.

– “The Game’s Afoot,” from The New York Review of Books on February 24, 2005.

– “On ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’,” from The New York Review of Books on June 9, 2005.

– “After the Apocalypse,” from The New York Review of Books on February 15, 2007.

The publication date seems to vary on who you check with. McSweeney’s says February; Amazon claims March 28.

The book is priced at $24. According to Chabon, all proceeds go to San Francisco-based youth writing center 826 Valencia and McSweeney’s. HarpersCollins will publish a paperback version in 2009, Chabon said.

It’s official! The Sundance Film Festival announced its 2008 lineup. And the film adaptation of Mysteries of Pittsburgh made the list. The festival is Jan. 17-27.

A poll of writers, celebrities and book critics ranked Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union as the No. 3 fiction novel in 2007.

“Best-seller lists really only show people what’s selling, not what people are reading. Recommendations are personal because it means someone has actually read that book. And who better to ask than award-winning poets, novelists, historians and critics?” John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, told the AP.

The poll was based on nearly 500 votes from the likes of John Updike and Anne Tyler.