Go, Look:The 5 Most Ridiculous Sex Self-Help Books

Cracked.com has done it again. Go, look!

Book News, In Brief

It's similar to the ol' chicken and the egg conundrum, only it's creativity and craziness.



You know your e-reader is in trouble when a physically frail vegan publicly mocks you without any fear of reprisal. Or: Yo, Amazon -- Steve Jobs laughs at your Kindle!


Sci-Fi is a genre with unlimited real world resonance. Not only can it keep kids celibate well into middle-age, but according to IO9, it holds the 10 secrets for rescuing our climate.


Aaron's Books has put out a plea to indie bookstores: Come Clean About Romance! In addition to making embarrassing admissions of aesthetic iffiness, they've detailed the dollars to be made with soft core softcovers. Via.


Curious what vampire fangs do to silicon implants? October's issue of Playboy will feature an eight page, heavily airbrushed, True Blood/Twilight-inspired pictorial. A question for our kinkier commenters: Does Hef usually theme entire issues around passing trends, or is this the first full-on bandwagon jump since the bald-is-the-new-black sculpting of Playmates' pubes?

When Adaptations Meet Corn Mazes, The Results Are Decidedly...Well...Corny

Click here for the whole cringe-inducing story.

Adaptation News(cuz sometimes, the book does suck)

John 'The Office' Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men has a trailer. Well, technically, Apple has it. Here. (God, just go, will you?)


Fresh off of the Disney-buys-Marvel rumor mill: Pixar may be eying an adaptation of Ant Man. Note to all: Take this news with a grain of salt an industrial sized container of sodium chloride.

Update: Shaun of the Dead & Scott Pilgrim director, Edgar Wright, says this ain't so...here.


Writer Robert Kirkman sat down with CBR recently to relay everything he knows, feels, and suspects about AMC's planned adaptation of his zombie comic book series, The Walking Dead.


The live action version of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga, Akira, seems to be back in the 'getting made someday' category. Latino Review has the details, while CHUD.com provides a bit of perspective on the prospective screenwriters.


2009 is Donald Westlake's year! (Too bad he died in 2008.) First comics wunderkind Darwyn Cooke does a four color version of Westlake's The Hunter, now Korean director extraordinaire Park Chan-Wook has announced plans to make a film of the crime writer's The Ax.


This week's resolution of the litigation between New Line Cinema and the estate of author J.R.R. Tolkien over The Lord of the Rings trilogy is shaping up as one of the biggest profit participation settlements in Hollywood history -- rumor has it it's up around $100 million. This settlement also clears the way for Guillermo del Toro's two film adaptation of The Hobbit.


According to Variety.com, George Clooney and Grant Heslov's film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, "takes Jon Ronson's book about 'the apparent madness at the heart of U.S. military intelligence' and fashions a superbly written loony-tunes satire...recalling many similar pics, from Dr. Strangelove to Three Kings, and the screwy so-insane-it-could-be-true illogic of Catch-22." The trailer for this can be found at Apple. Again. I mean...again. (Oh, fer chrissakes -- let's not go starting that again!)


Every week there's a new marketing tie-in for Twilight. This week is no different. Sci-Fi Wire reports, "Teen-focused interactive company Habbo is collaborating with Summit Entertainment to create a Twilight-themed virtual world. [...] The online space will include Twilight-centered "activities, items and polls." Users will be able to create their own characters and interact with other users in a virtual environment." If you want to know the truth, I blame this sort of nonsense on every bookstore that held a midnight release party for Breaking Dawn. All of you. Except us. We were under sexy-vampire mind control. We couldn't resist.

Big News! (Well, to geeks like me, anyway.)

The Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets: New Stories Vol. 2 is finally here, and with it, the end of Jaime's super-heroines story!
What's this? You say want a preview before you lay down any money on the thing?
Well, fine -- here!
(Oh, and you're welcome.)

Book News, In Brief

Yet another reason why indies are better than the big box stores -- we don't kill our shoplifters.


The Shallow Readers of Montpelier is looking for shallow readers. The VT based book club is making internet headlines for turning their noses up at upturned noses.


James Patterson has signed a 3 1/2 year deal with Hachette for a whopping 17 books. For those keeping count, that's roughly 4.85714 books a year from now 'til 2012.


Financial Times has done the impossible. They've broken down the whole Google Books fiasco -- concept, controversies and court cases -- into an easy to understand, one page primer.


Tiny mustache, giant eyes: A manga version of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has sold over 45,000 copies in less than a year. (And with sales like that, you can bet dollars to Deutschmarks that there will be an English language version released in the next few months.)

Writers on Writing

"A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul."
Aldous Huxley

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

Self-Publishing: Great Idea... or Worst Idea Ever? Pimp My Novel debates.


If You Give A Girl A Pen nixes the negatives, listing Some Do's for Writing, while leaving out the Don'ts.


Kill two birds with one stone -- edit while you write. Copyblogger covers this concept in a piece titled, How To Write With A Knife.


Although the bad ones are always more memorable, I'm still gonna point you in the direction of The Writer's Community's How to Craft a Great Metaphor.


Charles Baxter's author photo makes him out to be a mopey s.o.b., but dude does deliver a do-right list of 5 Questions You Can Ask Yourself About Your Story. Via.


Sometime between writing your magnum opus and sending it out to the hundreds of thousands of salivating agents, editors and publishers, you're gonna have to learn how to format a manuscript.

Cool Covers from Recent Releases

Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown by Edmund L. Andrews
Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell
















Never Sleep: Graduating to Graphic Design by Andre Andreev & Dan Covert
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
















The Implacable Order of Things by Jose Luis Peixoto
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck by John Steinbeck

Book News, In Brief

AbeBooks is selling a signed first edition of Truman Capote's The Thanksgiving Visitor for $1,000. What makes this negligibly newsworthy is the author's inscription: "For Harry Potter with gratitude, Truman Capote."


The LATimes gives false hope to out of work writers everywhere, telling the one-in-a-million tale of how two dads turned the iPhone into a platform for children's books as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do.


McSweeney's is often derided for their occasional lapses into navel-gazing preciousness, but is there any other publisher out there printing piercing, prescient, humor pieces about booksellers going bust? Nope. So props to the precious, yo. Your navel is like a lint laden crystal ball.


Bowker has published the first consumer-focused research report for U.S. Book Industry peeps. Among the stunning reveals are: 57% of book buyers are women, yet they purchase 65% of the books sold; men account for 55% of e-book purchases; and 30% of Gen-X consumers buy their books online. To order the complete $999 report (yeah, right), click here.


John Gilkey wanted to own a first edition of every book on Modern Library’s list of Top 100 novels. Only, he didn't want to buy them. He wanted to steal them. This led the crooked collector around the globe, into jail and across the pages of Allison Hoover Barlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective and a World of Literary Obsession. Ghost Word has a review of The Man (and 5 galley copies to give away!) here.