Published posthumously, this international bestseller is the first novel in a trilogy of crime thrillers by Swedish activist-journalist Stieg Larsson. A publisher struggles to clear his name and save his magazine by helping a rich businessman investigate the mystery of his missing niece.
I recently discovered this frequently updated string of Powell’s posts called “Read It Before They Screen It”. Among the most intriguing adaptations-in-the-making is Jim Crace’s Being Dead. Another fun fact: film rights to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle will be bestowed based on the quality of proposals pitched in person to author David Wroblewski.
According to the Bookseller, Lorrie Moore’s new novel — her first in over a decade — is coming out in 2009. Stephen Page at British publisher Faber gushes that A Gate at the Stairs “is a masterpiece for our times and only re-enforces her as one of the great writers of our age,” and Vicky Wilson at Moore’s US publisher, Knopf, calls the novel “a stunner.” The UK edition is due to publish next autumn; I’m not sure about the US-release date. What I am sure about is how excited I am to pick up A Gate at the Stairs. […]
Falling behind on Google Reader, I almost miss awesome things like this contest by Bookninja. The premise is to “rebrand” literary titles with covers and quotes that make them more mass marketesque. If you click nowhere else today, click here to behold the finalists and here to see Bookninja’s own offerings, including Beloved-as-apocalypse. The entires will make you laugh and think about the more serious repercussions of rebranding. Voting is still open; email editors@bookninja.com with your top three picks by Friday. One of my favorite contenders is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road “as parenting book.” (For a higher-res version, check out […]
Fictional characters are joining social networking sites. OK, “Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)” was awesome, but this? Discuss.
Without the need for description, and with the supposed thousand words per illustration, graphic novelists are allowed quiet moments of focus that might be dull or ponderous–or even nigh-impossible–to convey with straight prose. In Bottomless Belly Button, cartoonist Dash Shaw takes this technique to an extreme, decompressing what might typically, in prose form, be material for a short story or a novella into 700 pages of evocative panels: three grown siblings reunite at their childhood home after learning that their elderly parents have decided to split up.
“I really loved reading books when, at some point, I got the feeling I wasn’t supposed to be reading them.” My love for Kelly Link just grows and grows. That quote is from a great interview with her from Meeting House, a self-described “weekly journal of New England Literature and the Arts” whose site I will definitely be returning to. Another Link-able quote: “I don’t trust people who seem trustworthy, at least not in fiction. I’ve read too many mystery novels. In real life I think I’m more often gullible than not, easily disarmed or charmed by people I shouldn’t […]
I picked up Chris Crutcher’s Stotan! on an early-morning flight to Boston, ready to mock both the book and the 10-year-old version of myself who loved it. Starting with the exclamation point in the title and some early cumbersome exposition (which includes a very excellent and totally non-ironic mention of Tom Selleck as a sex symbol), I was sure the book would be dated and ridiculous and that I was in for a very good time. Of course, 180 pages later, I was in tears as I returned my tray table to the upright position.
Happily, not everyone predicts an imminent doomsday for the book (or book publishing). David Ulin at the LA Times urges publishers to stop panicking and “focus on the writing rather than the noise.” And Amelia Atlas at the New York Observer talks to some industry insiders who think the book might do OK in a recession: reading is, after all, a form of escape. She herself suggests: “There are only so many times, it would seem, that the industry can hear the sound of its own death knell and still worry.” Still, she quotes Sonny Mehta as saying that “Fiction […]
In his second novel, Zachary Lazar captures the shadow lurking just on the other side of Woodstock; Sway delivers a fresh and haunting take on cultural icons like Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson–and on the era they helped characterize.
