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Cracked.com has done it again. Go, look!
Friday, September 11, 2009
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?
Thursday, September 10, 2009
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.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
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.)
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, September 7, 2009
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.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Are You A Sandman Fan Looking For A Good Reason To Hate Neil Gaiman?
Try jealousy. Shown above is but one corner of Gaiman's home library. Click here to enviously eye the rest.
Dumbass Headmaster Decides to Discard All Books
Boston.com reports, "Cushing Academy has all the hallmarks of a New England prep school, with one exception.
This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks - the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.
'When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,' said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus."
To read the entire article, click here.
A Random Assortment of Book News & Links
So shallow and cruel, it's gotta be true: Gawker lists The Last 5 Ways to Get a Book Deal.
It's already on t-shirts, posters, cartoons and pasta. Is it really so surprising that there are now Naruto postage stamps?Five of the Top 10 Pirated eBooks of 2009 are sex-related, but you already knew that, didn't you? (Casts accusatory eye.) Didn't you?
OnlineColleges.net has made a list of 100 Useful Twitter Feeds for Book Lovers, and yes, we're on it. Hell, I wouldn't link to it if'n we weren't. Via.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Adaptation News (now in glorious black & white)
While this first one isn't actually an adaptation of anything, it does involve the publishing world, so I figured you naval-gazing industry folk would forgive the thematic lapse. Anyway, CBS has purchased the script for Open Books, a sitcom about a big city editor and her wacky friends. It's written by Will & Grace alumna, Gail Lerner.
USA Today has an interview with Juno director Jason Reitman about his new film, Up in the Air, based on the 2001 novel by Walter Kim. The film is about "a charismatic ax man hopscotching the country downsizing companies and occasionally delivering motivational speeches about the virtue of a relationship-free life," and stars George Clooney.
Steven Spielberg is developing a film of Michael Crichton's posthumously published novel , Pirate Latitudes, an adventure story set off the coast of Jamaica in 1665. My suggestions for financial success? Jurassic Park-level sfx, Johnny Depp as the dreadlocked, eyeliner wearing, male lead, and lots of Bob Marley music. My suggestion for critical success: Don't do it.
A while back I posted a piece about Hollywood's unsuccessful attempts to adapt Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? Last Wednesday, two of the folks responsible for these ill-fated attempts -- actor/director Ben Stiller and Permanent Midnight author, Jerry Stahl -- spoke to The Huffington Post about their trials and travails attempting to bring Budd's masterpiece to the big screen. Click here to read.
And now my obligatory Where The Wild Things Are post, via Slashfilm.com: The Museum of Modern Art has announced the first-ever exhibition to focus on Spike Jonze, "celebrating his work as a director, producer, cinematographer, writer, actor, choreographer, and sometime stuntman." Among the many music videos, skateboard films, mini-documentaries and Hollywood blockbusters to be screened is a short film Jonze made with Maurice Sendak during the production of Where The Wild Things Are. If, like me, you can't make it to NYC to bow down in front of one of your cinematic idols, yesterday's NYTimes had a nice, looong piece on Jonze and his WTWTA film.
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