So much for a sleepy August. Lotsa book buzz, including these tidbits…

• Mark Sundeen heeds the Call of the Wild for Believer magazine. “I parked at the visitor’s center of Jack London State Historic Park, awaiting the arrival of America’s — and the world’s — preeminent Jack London impersonator. We’d been telephoning and exchanging emails for six months, and I’d finally flown to San Francisco, rented a car, and driven up to Sonoma County, site of London’s Beauty Ranch and the place where in 1916 the author succumbed to a life of smoking, drinking, and hard living — and died at age forty.”

• LA Times writer Josh Getlin explores Amy Wilentz’ California and notes, “Wilentz, for her part, isn’t fleeing on the next red-eye. ‘I’ve never really stayed in the place I’ve written about,’ she says. ‘Usually it’s a book and a kiss goodbye. But I’m not going anywhere. This is my home now.’”

• Gotta love this Q & A with compulsive storyteller Derek Powazek.

• AftertheMFA chats with The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop author Lewis Buzbee.

• Al Gore tells Marin County the Inconvenient Truth. Pix here.

• OC Weekly writer Nick Schou writes a book about Gary Webb, the former San Jose Mercury News reporter who claimed a CIA-Contra link to the American crack epidemic and later committed suicide. It’s called Kill the Messenger.

• Cory Doctorow points to Book Mooch, a new book swapping service.

• In The Chicago Sun-Times: Authors who stalk Oprah and her dad’s barbershop, too.