Public Affairs has picked up Bigger Than Life, a collection by L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan. The book is due for publication in Fall 2006, says Publishers Lunch. Also: the French journalist and filmmaker Bernard-Henri Lévy, who visited Los Angeles last year for his series of articles on the United States in the Atlantic, is expanding the pieces into a book to be called American Vertigo. It went to Random House. The same editor at Random House, Will Murphy, also just bought "a short history of modern China" by Orville Schell, Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School for Journalism.