We’ve seen a lot of book adaptations lately, from Where the Wild Things Are to Precious to The Lovely Bones. Screenwriters and directors cut scenes here and add scenes there to transform the book into a cohesive viewing experience. A good adaptation can be a brand-new work of art. But in the [...]

For some time I was one of few standing firmly in both camps—writer and gamer, fiction-fiend and pixel-popper. But the innovative nature of Next-Gen gaming, with its leaps in technology and massive install-base, means games have developed new depth–and the future of gaming promises to look a lot more like literature than flight simulators. This is, in many ways, the rise of a new novel. Like its lexicographic predecessor, the pixilated form revels in moral ambiguity, character motivations, conflicts between free will and fate.

Electric Literature presents this video adaptation of “The Cows”–a one-sentence story by Lydia Davis–created by artist Donna K. Bonus: did I mention it’s claymation?

Via.

We’ve talked about book trailers on FWR before (see below)–and it seems they’re gaining an even larger (and more interesting) presence…one aspiring to an adaptation genre of its own.
GalleyCat reports that the trailer for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters will be shown in movie theatres around the country. That’s the book trailer, [...]

So you didn’t win the auction for Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter. (Ahem–if you did, we know a great literary site that you could support as well!)
For everyone else without a spare $254,500, we offer this interview with McCarthy in theWall Street Journal, available online for free. In the wide-ranging conversation, McCarthy discusses the [...]

Books always make great presents, but just wrapping it up and handing it over is a little… blah. MotherReader offers a list of 105 books paired with complementary gifts. Ideas are grouped by recipient’s age range; many are aimed at kids and could be great ways to encourage budding readers. Here’s a [...]

Even the idea itself is intriguing: pair twelve international illustrators and short fiction writers, press go, see what happens. The slim, wonderfully designed collection We Are the Friction sets the stage for unexpected relationships. Following their 2008 collaboration, I Am the Friction, the masterminds behind the concept are designer Jez Burrows and illustrator Lizzy Stewart, who together form Sing Statistics. Both Burrows and Stewart are based in Edinburgh, but the two-dozen writers and illustrators in this anthology reside across the globe – from Toronto to Kansas City to Barcelona. The cover promises a veritable garden of earthly delights: “5 Giant Animals, 63 Expletives, 6 Instances of the Ocean,” and “1 Sentient Muffin” among them. Let’s begin with that muffin.

Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are is nearly 50 years old, but the release of Spike Jonze’s film adaptation has sparked a resurgence of critical interpretations of the story. A sampling:
On the Oxford University Press blog, philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma ties our love for Where the Wild Things Are [...]

I saw Wendy and Lucy this past April, and there wasn’t any sound for the first ten minutes. Well, not no sound; there were the suggestions of breathing, some ambient rustling. The whispers filling the theater were mainly curious—could this be some new super-indie technique, perfected by director Kelly Reichardt for her second film? It turned out to be a technical mistake, and I found out what I missed when I read Jon Raymond’s “Train Choir,” the closing piece in his first collection, Livability, and the story on which Reichardt’s film is based.

Paramount has just revealed the trailer for the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. The film, directed by Peter Jackson, stars Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz, and Saoirse Ronan (Briony in the movie version Atonement, and no stranger to literary adaptations).
I had a hard time imagining how this book would [...]