Publishers Weekly reports that close on the heels of this winter's release of The Golden Compass, the first film based on Philip Pullman's magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy, Knopf will be publishing a new story in the series, a prequel of sorts called Once Upon a Time in the North. This isn't the first time Pullman's revisited the worlds he created; he published another freestanding short story, Lyra's Oxford, in 2003, which was quite wonderful. We're extremely excited that the worlds of Lyra and Will will continue, even if those characters reportedly won't appear in this book.

We sort of think this is exactly what J.K. Rowling should do: go ahead and write other things, but every once in a while dip back into Harry Potter's world for short stories, just to give us a tiny taste of the books we love so much.

Fickling to Publish New Pullman Story [PW]