Posts
Author/trench coat model Neil Gaiman thinks that the 'death of audiobooks' is just a case of folks talking out their asses.
Kinda-sorta sister-lists to our own Listmania: Best of 2009s: Ozaku's and The Precious Curmudgeon's lists of Manga Gift Guide Lists.
Author/masturbation magician Grant Morrison has a feature length documentary about himself coming out in 2010. Wired has two clips from it here.
Wired again. This time they're skewering a modern-day literary classic with The Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight. Now with video!
"Borders has gone belly-up, Amazon thrives, and doom-mongers are proclaiming the death of literature on the high street. But this could be the opening of a fine new chapter…" Or so The Guardian UK claims.
Jonathan Littell has won the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award for his 900-page novel, The Kindly Ones. The passage that cinched the win compared vaginas to various Greek mythological creatures including the snake-haired Gorgon and "a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks." Sexy!
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Book News, In Brief
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Writers on Writing
"A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose."
Samuel McChord Crothers
Gift Tips for the Bookish:
Toys Action Figures Collectible Figurines
December means holidays! Holidays mean gifts! Gifts mean otherwise avoidable stress-related illnesses, as good gift ideas inevitably dry up the closer you get to your pagan festival of choice. Ah, but fear not! Cuz from now until the end of the month, we'll be highlighting some prime prose-related presents for the bookish folks on your shopping list. As for the non-bookish folks...well, they get spam-laden e-cards.
Oscar Wilde action figure.
Available for $8.95 here.
Jane Austen action figure.
Available for $9.95 here.
Yotsuba&! pose-able figures.
Yotsuba is available for $16 here.
Cardbo/Danbo is available for considerably more here.
Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba's The Umbrella Academy.
Available for $33.99 here.
Editor's note: For the record, none of the sites linked to here -- or anywhere else on our site -- provide us with any sort of payment, credit, or compensation. When we post something like this, it's because we think this sh*t's cool. When we accompany these posts with purchasing links, we do so only so that similarly interested parties can easily obtain these products without spending hours on Google or (gasp!) resorting to Amazon. Trust me, when it comes time to whore myself out, it'll be on a street corner, and I'll be in drag.
Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers
The title says it best: Why Writing Rubbish is Productive
Fiction Notes details the two types of feedback, as well as the five reactions to it.
Writing blogs are currently obsessed with correct comma usage. Don't believe me? Click here, here, and here.
Fiction Matters has 3 Questions To Better Understand Your Novel (that will also help you write a better query letter).
Bad Language About Writing's Open with a Punch, Close with a Kick would be more effective if most writers weren't potbellied pacifists.
Nothing cripples creativity like self-doubt. A quick read through Quips & Tips' 4 Signs You Need to Reevaluate Your Writing or Publication Goals and you'll be positively paralyzed. Hello, handicapped parking!
Monday, November 30, 2009
The Minimalist Cover Art of Evan Gaffney
Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead
Spent by Geoffrey Miller
Fangland by John Marks
Twelve Fingers: Biography of an Anarchist by Jô Soares
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Gaffney's minimalist approach is apparent on his website, too. It's just one page -- no pictures, no links.
Wendell's 30 Book Review:
Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
Calvino’s Italian Folktales is now my favorite folktale collection. It is a huge paperback with hundreds of stories in it, which average about two pages each. Calvino collected Italian folktales, sometimes building on previous folktale collectors’ work, and made slight changes - which he makes note of, unlike the Grimms - for continuity or even aesthetics. I would not have noticed the changes myself, as the tales still feel “authentic” to the spirit of the story, while having an elegant simplicity to the language, even in translation! The wonder I find in the stories shares space with a matter-of-fact attitude towards the roughness of life-giving it no more or less attention than it should have - as well as just the right amount of the bizarre to please my tastes. Thanks to these folktales, my imagination is sparked, and my interest in using the phrase “seek my fortune” in daily life is growing. Now to see whether this fortune includes a castle!
This will be Wendell 'Scutopus' Edwards' last book review, as he is heading off to NYC to find fame and fortune. Good luck, Wendell. You -- and your reviews -- will be missed.
Listmania: Best of 2009s
'Tis the last day of the next to the last month of the year. While this monumental day in your monthly calendar's countdown to extinction inevitably brings with it a sh*toad of personal, financial and familial regrets, it also ushers in a sh*tload of 'Best Of' book lists. For the sake of our sanity, let's focus on those.
NPR's Best Cookbooks of 2009
The L.A. Times' Favorite fiction of 2009
The NYTimes' 100 Notable Books of '09
ALA's 2009 Best Books for Young Adults
Entertainment Weekly's 10 Beautiful Books
Blackwell's 10 Favourite Books of the Decade
The NYTimes' Notable Crime Books of 2009
Booklist's Best Books for Young Adults: 2009
Lifehack's 10 Best Productivity Books of 2009
The National Book Awards' Best Books of 2009
NPR's Big and Beautiful: Best Gift Books of 2009
Examiner.com's 10 Best Book Club books of 2009
Drawn!'s Favourite Comics and Art Books of 2009
Publishers Weekly's 8 Different(!) Best of 2009 lists
The Globe & Mail's 11 Different(!!) Best of 2009 lists
The Millions' Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)
The NYTimes' Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009
Politics & Prose's Favorite Graphic Literature of the Year
Small Business Trends' Best Small Business Books of 2009
The Christian Science Monitor's Best Books of 2009: Fiction
The Christchurch City Libraries Blog's Best and Worst of 2009
Human Events' Top 10 Best-Selling Conservative Books in 2009
Paul Gravett's Angoulême 2010: The Best French Comics Of 2009
The Washington Post's Best Fiction, Nonfiction, and Top 10 of 2009
The Comics Reporter's The Best Superhero Comics of the 00s, and his readers' picks
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Happy Thanksgiving!
(And a solemn 'Uh...sorry?' to our Wampanoag brothers and sisters.)
See you Monday!
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
This Week's Best Comics Links
(a.k.a. your last bit of joy before fighting with your effed-up family)
The 1975 manga version of Jaws is nuts. For two sick samples, click here and here. Then up the ante and click here to check out Junji Ito's absolutely insane when-fish-attack manga, Gyo.
You'd better make this link last, cuz it's the last one til Monday: David Welsh folds his hands, bows his head, and shares the manga-related developments for which he's thankful. Can he get an amen?
Book News, In Brief
Daryl Cagle must be as unhealthily obsessed with Sarah Palin as I am. Why else would he have compiled 30 Editorial Cartoons Lampooning Palin's Book Tour?
Eff Thanksgiving. We're celebrating our enemy's apparent demise: Borders' UK website has stopped taking customer orders, and their staff has been told that they are no longer allowed to place customer orders. For more details (and dirt), click here.
A copy of Through the Looking Glass once owned by the 'Alice' who inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland will be sold at an auction next month. If you've got enough free time to read these links, you're not working a in field that pays you enough to bid.
Samuel Webster is right when he says that "Young Adult Fiction is one of the few genres with a psychologically pervasive and accepted sociological function," which is why I love that his article, The Ideology and Irony of Adolescent Fiction, takes the fawned-over field to task.
American Media Inc., critically acclaimed publisher of The National Enquirer and Star, has struck a deal with Playboy Enterprises to manage major parts of its flailing flagship title. What does this mean for you and I and the rest of those enlightened individuals who enjoy Playboy's thought-provoking interviews and airbrushed anuses? The photos will be sleazier, the prose will plummet.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers
Ray Bradbury offers a bit of advice to flailing writers: Flail more.
Masturbate to this: Rants & Ramblings' How Book Royalties Work.
I'm not sure how scientific this list is, but it feels fairly feasible. Wordplay's Top 7 Reasons Readers Stop Reading. (Via.)
Doyce Testerman offers a helping hand to NaNoWriMo writers looking to pad out their anorexic opuses: The Rule of Three! (Via.)
Thanks to technology, learning to write no longer requires reading! A free recording of the 'teleclass' Breaking Into Food Writing is available here. (Via.)
A Distant Soil creator Collen Doran has compiled the links to all of her hard-won lessons about self-publishing and webcomics onto one easy-to-navigate table of contents. If you're considering a life in either, you'll wanna bookmark these.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Recommended Viewing: Going West
Trashing a book to tell a story. It doesn't sound like it would work, but the results speak for themselves.
(Via: Cartoon Brew)
Comic Book Review:
Cable & Deadpool by Fabian Nicieza, et al.
Writer Fabian Nicieza's 
Cable & Deadpool is a 50 issue 'buddy-movie' starring the Marvel Universe's equivalents of Jesus Christ and Bugs Bunny. It promised loose laughs and even looser sci-fi concepts, yet somehow managed to morph into an affecting ode to fractured friendships and surrogate families.
The plot -- as it was initially pitched -- was simple. Well, sorta. Fast-talking killer-for-hire Deadpool (a.k.a. 'the merc with the mouth') is paired up with time-traveling, soldier from the future, Cable (a.k.a. the son of the X-Men's Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey). Deadpool wants money. Cable wants to provide the preventative measures required to stop Earth from becoming a war-torn wasteland. You know, your basic run-of-the-mill comedy of opposites with minor Messianic undertones.
Story lines run the gamut, going from blue-skinned cults to hard boiled detective stories to the at-least-it's-dealt-with-quickly Civil War crossover, all while supporting an over-arching plot line partially lifted from the end of Alan Moore's/beginning of Neil Gaiman's run on Miracleman: Cable's creation of island utopia via his many mutant abilities. This is the 'real' story here, the one that you'll find blurbed on the back of the trade paperbacks and in the lead paragraph of the title's Wikipedia entry. And for good reason -- it's good! Nicieza intelligently explores the pros and cons of living under the gentle fist of an all-powerful peacekeeper, all the while using Deadpool's batsh*t crazy blood-lust (and Bea Arthur-inspired loin-lust) as the fail-safe for keeping things unpretentious and unpredictable.
Up to issue 42, I was really enjoying the series. The action was exciting, the dialogue irreverent, and the art (almost always) enjoyable. But as a perpetual pruner of my comics collection, I had no intention of holding onto these books when I was done. 'Out with the old, in with expensive, hardcover, classic comics re-prints,' as they say. It's not that there was anything particularly wrong with the series, it's just that, up til that point, there was nothing especially right. Wait, let me re-phrase that. There was a lot 'right.' The jokes alone were worth the price of admission. It's just that nothing had hit me in such a way that I thought, 'You know, I could come back to these books year after year and always find myself emotionally engaged in more ways than giggles.' As corny as it sounds, I want the art I keep around me to be the art that adds to me, that betters me, that reminds me of ideas, ideals and philosophies that I'm prone to lose sight of during my day-to-day living. And up to issue 42, Cable & Deadpool had yet to offer anything in the way of this awkwardly worded request.
Or so I thought.
Here's where I've gotta offer up one of those annoying, all-caps SPOILER ALERT!s. I mean, if you scan the titles of the trade paperbacks, this spoilerific plot point is actually a title-changing event, but some folks are sensitive to this sort of thing. You want a hint? The book goes from being called Cable & Deadpool to Deadpool vs. The Marvel Universe. Did you see what just happened there? SPOILER ALERT! (again!) Cable died. Yes, on the next-to-the-last page of issue 42, Cable sacrifices himself while his Nantucket-like nirvana explodes in a fiery, Photoshop-assisted explosion. From that point on, for the last eight issues of the series, Deadpool is bounced from one guest star to another in a style reminiscent of Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. In most corporate comics, this is usually the 'jump the shark' moment, the first glimpse of the shadow of death for any teetering title. Yet somehow (no, not "somehow" -- because of the authorial ingenuity of Fabian Niciez!) it's this extended dying breath of the soon-to-be-canceled comic where things really come together. Having lost the only character in the Marvel Universe who truly believes in him, Deadpool begins to begrudgingly surround himself with a new cast of surrogate sidekicks. They're a motley band of has-beens (Sandi, Outlaw, Agent X) and never-weres (the brilliantly conceived Bob, Agent of Hydra) who, as the last few issues unfold, become a sort of 'workplace family' for our fast-talking antihero. It's this last bit of character building that adds an unexpected gravitas to the series as whole. All of the wacky adventures, pseudo-science, and Christ-like posturing was fun while it lasted, but it's Cable and Deadpool's platonic partnership that now resonates most with the reader. After all, it's only because of the unconditional love and devotion that Cable had shown the oft-undeserving Deadpool that Deadpool is now able to open himself up similarly to others. (Well, he might've been open to a little sumthin'-sumthin' with the aforementioned Bea Arthur, but that was about it.) This is an obvious insight, I know, but it's also one that is nice to have reiterated from time to time. It's especially nice when it's done using a clinically insane comic book character who breaks the fourth wall while wearing boxer shorts emblazoned with his own iconic emblem.
At least, it was for me. And will be again. Cuz I'm hanging on to these.
Book News, In Brief
Nice Girls Do author Sarah Duncan says 'Enough with the Bad Sex Awards -- where's the squishy, squashy, interlocking Good Sex Trophies?!'
Local guy makes good. Providence poet Keith Waldrop won a National Book Award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. To hear the bearded bard read some of his work, click here.
What happens when your thinly-veiled memoir makes headlines for being a, well, thinly veiled memoir? The Australian explores the inevitable emotional outfall.
A Latino-centric poetry series at East Harlem's El Museo del Barrio is causing a bit of controversy over its title: Spic Up/Speak Out. The naysayers label it "a complete lack of consciousness," while the yea-sayers say, "You do not want to fall into this dogma where all Puerto Rican or Latino writers have to be serious. [...] This can be a moment of reflection."
Every bookseller I've talked to has a secret bookstore backup plan. You know, for when Amazon puts the shop you're currently working at out of business, this is the place you plan to apply to next. For me, it's always been a 50/50 toss-up between Los Feliz' Skylight Books and Boston's Comicopia. But this article in The Morning Call has me contemplating a third option, this one a PA bookstore that serves as a fully-functional front for a South Bethlehem speakeasy!
