The writer of one of the most beloved children’s books series – Harry Potter, JK Rowling had stated clearly that she will not kowtow to international pressure and write another book about Harry, his friends and Hogwarts ever again. With the recently released Tales of Beedle The Bard, Rowling sticks, though barely by the skin of her teeth, to her determined statement. 

Rowling has provided an interesting blend of unusual story-lines and a folky flavour to these tales and makes it a point to retain the most essential feature of folk tales – a moral - which is overwhelming in some stories (‘The Wizard And The Hopping Pot’). This is presented in unique ways in others. True to the style she had adopted toward the end of her Harry Potter career, she makes at least one of these stories absolutely brutal.

What do Harry Potter stars do after the magic fades? Appear nude, it would seem. First, it was the boy playing the Boy Who Lived, Daniel Radcliffe, who bared it in a play called Equus. And now, it seems Emma Watson’s turn.

Watson, who plays Harry Potter’s geeky-turned-beautiful inseparable friend Hermione Granger in the movies based on the super-selling books by British author J K Rowling, said recently that she was open to going nude for a good director, because ‘it is part of my job’ as an actress.

And the example of such a director? Italian arty filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, she said. But, Watson told Britain’s The Sunday Times Style magazine, she wants to concentrate on her studies as well, and has ‘enough to hold me together without fame.’

Book sellers too have bene hit by the global recession and are hopoing for a miracle to change the current situation. With a hope to recreate the Harry Potter magic, author J.K. Rowling has introduced “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”; a collection of five fables mentioned in her saga of a e boy wizard. Published across the world, it has but a fraction of the carnival-like fanfare that greeted the Potter novels.

With expectations looming large, the new book has a global print run of 8 million copies. Enormous as compared to Potter books, the retailers are not expecting the new book to generate the frenzy that accompanied the publication of the “Deathly Hallows” in July 2007, when fans dressed as witches and warlocks formed festive crowds outside book stores around the world. Amazon, the internet retailer however is is printing 100,000 copies of a leather-bound collectors’ edition priced at 50 pounds, or $100 in the United States, and expects them to be a complete sell out.