Shawn Adler wrote:When news was came recently that director Guillermo del Toro was writing a series of vampire novels with author Chuck Hogan, headlines and columns across the internet rang out in chorus: committed for the next four years to “The Hobbit” and some half dozen projects after that, del Toro was already straining, spreading himself too thin. He would never — how could he ever — possibly find the time?
Problem is, the story isn’t true, del Toro told MTV News. He’s not writing a series of vampire books with Chuck Hogan – he wrote them.
“It looks incredibly busy and baroque, but everything has its own place. These things seem to happen simultaneously, but the reality is they are announced simultaneously,” the affable and visionary director said. “The novels – it’s been written already. Chuck Hogan and I have been collaborating for over a year. I wrote the outline for that novel almost two years ago.”
It’s a good thing too, given the “epic” scope del Toro envisions for the project, which traces the lore of vampires all the way from antiquity to the modern age – the type of vampire story that isn’t really told anymore, the type that owes as much to Mesopotamian myths as it does to Bram Stoker.
Indeed, even just a cursory search of vampires on Wikipedia reveals legends and tales of the undead from nearly every culture in history – stories of deceased Eastern Europeans rising from their graves or Old Testament bloodsuckers hungry for a next meal.
And if those ancient stories aren’t really told anymore, well, that’s exactly what attracts them to del Toro, the director said, adding that the release of the trilogy will culminate a lifetime’s worth of fascination with and love for those myths, ideas he’s been “keeping in [his] notebooks ever since the mid-90s.”
“I wanted to find a place to create a vampiric epic that takes you all the way to the modern day, to find out when the vampires started - going beyond Mesopotamian myth, going beyond all of that,” del Toro grinned. “Not the attractive, Brad Pitt-esque, decadent lovers that have sex. I wanted to make them like an alternate species and an alternate spiritual creature to man, and the idea is that the series will flesh out that re-invented vampiric myth - respectful of the lore, but taking you through the ages.”
But while the story will go through history, it’ll start in modern times, del Toro said, revealing details about the first novel’s plot for the first time.
“The first novel is sort of a procedural horror novel, which starts at an investigation of a plane that is essentially like the ship in [Stoker’s] ‘Dracula’ - it just stopped and everybody on board was dead,” del Toro teased, referencing “The Dementer,” a ship Dracula boards to London which arrives with just the Captain alive – the rest of the crew victim to the winged one’s thirst for blood. “And an investigation ensues.
“And what happens is an epidemic,” he continued, connecting disease to the first novel’s title, “The Strain.” “But it’s an epidemic unlike I believe the stuff that is [big] in vampiric fiction.”
“The Strain” will get released sometime next summer.
The book, "Night Talk" by Elizabeth Cox, is about a friendship between a black and a white girl during the civil rights movement. But parent Laura Booth says the book contains graphic sex scenes and "reads like pornography."
A committee at South Gwinnett High School denied Booth's request in November, saying the book's instructional value outweighs her concerns. The Snellville mother is scheduled to make her case before a districtwide committee in February.
darkjedijaina wrote:the book contains graphic sex scenes and "reads like pornography."
The Todd wrote:EDIT - SPOILERS-FIVE!!!!!
The Twilight series, as broken down by someone with more than a passing knowledge of Mormonism:
Twilight
New Moon
Eclipse
Breaking Dawn
The Todd wrote:2 Posthumous Michael Crichton Novels on the Way
Jack Foley, the charming bank robber from Out of Sight, is serving a thirty-year sentence in a Miami penitentiary, but he's made an unlikely friend on the inside who just might be able to do something about that. Fellow inmate Cundo Rey, an extremely wealthy Cuban criminal, arranges for Foley's sentence to be reduced from thirty years to three months, and when Jack is released just two weeks ahead of Cundo, he agrees to wait for him in Venice Beach, California.
Also waiting for Cundo is his common-law wife, Dawn Navarro, a professional psychic with a slightly ulterior motive for staying with Cundo: namely, she wants his money. And with the arrival of Jack, she sees the perfect partner in a plan to relieve Cundo of his fortune. Cundo may be Jack's friend, but does that mean he can trust him? And can either of them trust Dawn?
Road Dogs is Elmore Leonard at his best—with his trademark tight plotting and pitch-perfect dialogue—and readers will love seeing Cundo, Jack, and Dawn back in action and working together . . . or are they?
Two decades after Scott Turow wrote the blockbuster courtroom thriller “Presumed Innocent” he is writing a sequel and switching hardcover publishers for the new book.
In May 2010 Grand Central Publishing, which has released seven of Mr. Turow’s novels in paperback, will publish the hardcover edition of the sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” originally published in hardcover by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1987.
The new book opens with a prologue in which Rusty Sabich, the protagonist of “Presumed Innocent” and now the chief judge of an appellate court, sits on a bed where his dead wife, Barbara, lies. She has died under suspicious circumstances, which triggers a plot that again pits Rusty, now 60, against Tommy Molto, the district attorney who tried to prosecute him for the murder of his lover in the first novel.
Mr. Turow said in an interview that it no longer made sense to have one house publishing his books in hardcover and another releasing them in paperback. Such arrangements were common when he first sold the rights to “Presumed Innocent” in 1986 but are much rarer now, especially for a bestselling author. Terms of the new deal were not disclosed.
Mr. Turow said he was in no way disappointed with his relationships at Farrar, Straus or with his longtime editor, Jonathan Galassi. Mr. Galassi said there were no hard feelings over the departure. “He’s had to make another arrangement,” Mr. Galassi said. “I’m very sorry to lose him.”
Gail Hochman, Mr. Turow’s agent, said splitting editions between two houses made it more difficult for an author to achieve the best possible financial arrangement. “We’re not unhappy with anything we’ve gotten, but it stretches the boundaries of the business,” she said. “Any publisher will acknowledge that if they are going to pay a significant advance for a significant author, they can make their money back and work harder on the book if they have two editions.”
“Presumed Innocent” has been Mr. Turow’s most successful novel by far, selling close to four million copies in hardcover and paperback in the United States alone. It was adapted into a movie starring Harrison Ford. Mr. Turow has consistently hit the best-seller lists with titles like “Reversible Errors” and “Ordinary Heroes,” though they have not sold anywhere close to the numbers of “Presumed Innocent.”
The seed of the sequel had been sitting on Mr. Turow’s desk for months, in the form of a Post-it note on which he had written: “A man is sitting on a bed in which the dead body of a woman lies.” Eventually the image that appeared to him was of Rusty sitting on the bed with Barbara.
Mr. Turow said he had long insisted that he would never write a sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” although Rusty has appeared tangentially in other novels. But, he said, “once your own story seems to beckon to you, then whatever stop signs you hold up for yourself, you tend to blow through them.”
Writing the sequel — for which he has a working title of “Innocent” — “seems to dare the Olympian gods to go back there,” Mr. Turow said. “But I found myself really interested in the fate of this man who is a year or two older than I am.” Mr. Turow turns 60 on Sunday.
Deb Futter, editor in chief for hardcovers at Grand Central, said the company would most likely issue new editions of Mr. Turow’s other novels. She said the publisher also hoped to release a special edition of “Presumed Innocent” to capitalize on the sequel. “ ‘Presumed Innocent’ was the big kahuna,” she said, “which is why the sequel is so exciting.”
New Dan Brown novel coming in September
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
NEW YORK – The book world has a stimulus plan: a new Dan Brown novel.
Six years after the release of his mega-selling "The Da Vinci Code," the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announced that Brown's "The Lost Symbol," a thriller set during a 12-hour period and featuring "Da Vinci Code" symbolist Robert Langdon, will come out in September.
"This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey," Brown said in a statement issued Monday by his publisher. "Weaving five years of research into the story's twelve-hour time frame was an exhilarating challenge. Robert Langdon's life clearly moves a lot faster than mine."
The first printing will be 5 million copies, Knopf Doubleday said, the highest in the publisher's history but well below the opening 10 million-plus print run for the final "Harry Potter" book. "The Da Vinci Code" has sold more than 80 million worldwide and inspired a spin-off community of travel books, diet books, conspiracy books, parodies and religious works.
A film version, starring Tom Hanks, came out in 2006 and made more than $700 million at the box office. Hanks will again be seen as Langdon when the adaptation of Brown's "Angels & Demons" debuts in May.
By Monday night, "The Lost Symbol" was No. 1 on Barnes & Noble.com and approaching the top 100 on Amazon.com. In a sign of likely price wars to come, both sites were offering discounts of 40 percent and higher for the $28.95 novel.
Brown, 44, had kept his readers and the struggling book industry in suspense as year after year passed without a new novel. As far back as 2004, Doubleday had hinted that a follow up was coming, tentatively titled "The Solomon Key" and widely believed to be about Freemasons in Washington, D.C. (Brown has been spotted over the years in Washington, researching Masonic temples.)
Anticipation for "The Solomon Key" was so high that a "guide" to the novel was published in 2005 and remains in print.
Monday's announcement did not say where the story was set or who it would be about, and Doubleday spokeswoman Suzanne Herz declined to offer further information. In "The Da Vinci Code," a murder at the Louvre museum in Paris sets Langdon on an investigation that includes secret religious cults and speculation that Jesus had fathered a child with Mary Magdalene — a scenario that enraged scholars, critics and religious officials, all of it only bringing the book more readers.
Eager for success, but unprepared for obsession, Brown became increasingly reluctant to make public appearances or talk to the media. His reserve was only magnified by a copyright infringement lawsuit that was decided in his favor, but not before Brown was forced to testify in London and prepare an in-depth brief about his career, writing process and the fury he faced when promoting "The Da Vinci Code."
"I recall feeling defenseless because more than a year had passed since I'd researched and written the novel, and the precise names, dates, places and facts had faded somewhat in my memory," Brown wrote.
The trial, too, only made his book sell more.
Inspired in part by the commercial fiction of Sidney Sheldon, Brown is an Amherst College graduate who has said he long gave up on the idea of being a literary writer and instead wanted to write novels read by many. But neither the author nor his publisher nor booksellers expected such a boom for "The Da Vinci Code," his fourth novel, which remained on best-seller lists for more than three years and made million sellers out of such previous books as "Deception Point" and "Angels & Demons."
The long silence after "The Da Vinci Code," far longer than the time spent between his previous books, led to speculation that Brown was hopelessly blocked, as staggered by fame as "Forever Amber" author Kathleen Winsor or Grace Metalious of "Peyton Place," novelists who never again approached the heights of their controversial best-sellers.
Brown is a native of Exeter, N.H., who still lives in his home state with his wife, Blythe Brown, whom the novelist cited during the London trial as a virtual co-author, an energetic researcher who brought an invaluable "female perspective" to a book immersed in "the sacred feminine, goddess worship and the feminine aspect of spiritually."
From ChudTyrone_Shoelaces wrote:Let's see how long it takes Ron Howard to hack this into theaters too.
Sony isn't waiting to see if Angels and Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, does well this summer. According to Variety they've already jumped all over The Lost Symbol and will now attempt to get Ron Howard and Tom Hanks back on board for the threepeat.
Subscribers to Tim Burton’s official website have tonight received an e-mail announcing The Art of Tim Burton, a limited edition hard cover book that will feature over 1000 illustrations on over 400 pages.
The Todd wrote:Newly Released Books - 05/20
One book stood out on the list, and that's Dark Places by Gillian Flynn. The former Entertainment Weekly writer who penned the Zone's BotM selection, Sharp Objects - for those of you who liked that book.
Jonathan Cape editor Alex Bowler has over-powered rival publishers to buy a book on superheroes by Scottish comics "legend" Grant Morrison. Bowler bought EU, UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) to Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Peter McGuigan at Foundry.
Bowler described Supergods as "the definitive history of the superhero", from the invention of Superman in 1938, through to the movie versions of "Watchmen" and "Wolverine".
Morrison has been a comics writer for more than 20 years, writing superhero stories for DC Comics and Marvel, and creating the adult comic book series The Invisibles and follow-up The Filth. His comics sold in the region of three million copies in the US alone last year, said Cape, as well as 200,000 copies of his collections and graphic novels. Bowler said that Morrison was "a comics legend and the one person you would want to write this book," calling him "the ultimate comic-book insider, [with] an irrepressible pop-culture mind, and a consummate raconteur."
He also promised Supergods would be a book "like no other", adding: "Our world and the world of the superhero are going to be fed into the brilliant blender of Grant's brain, so expect philosophy, anthropology, Buddhism, mad science, capes and punk rock."
Supergods will be published in August 2010.
The US deal has just been confirmed: Supergods will be published by Christopher Jackson at Spiegel & Grau (Doubleday).
Nabokov's unfinished -- and unburned -- novel reappears
by Paola Messana – Sat Nov 7, 2:05 pm ET
NEW YORK (AFP) – Vladimir Nabokov wanted it burned on his death, but "The Original of Laura" survived and now, 32 years later, the unfinished novel is about to be published for the first time.
Despite Nabokov's dying wish, publication of the manuscript, which was compiled on index cards, is set for November 17 in New York and London, giving what many hope will be an unexpected glimpse of his genius.
The Russian-born writer's widow Vera had already saved his most famous work, "Lolita," from the flames, and their son Dmitry, 75, followed suit by preserving "Laura."
Yet the family hesitated for 30 years before finally going to literary agent Andrew Wylie who negotiated a deal with Knopf/Random House in the United States and Penguin in Britain.
The manuscript -- 138 index cards -- until now has been locked in a bank vault in Montreux, Switzerland, where Nabokov died in 1977.
Like "Lolita", "The Original of Laura" is in English. The author was born in Saint Petersburg and emigrated with his family at the time of the 1917 revolution, but began to write in English from 1941.
The contents of the book are known only to a highly restricted circle including the family, but debate has raged for three decades over whether or not the author's wishes should be respected.
"Dmitry made the right decision. Had his father wanted it destroyed, he would have done so himself," Gavriel Shapiro, Russian literature professor at Cornell University and an author of several books on Nabokov, told AFP.
Shapiro noted that Nabokov, who taught at Cornell between 1948 and 1959, had also wanted to burn "Lolita," the book that made him world famous in 1955.
"At one point, Nabokov wanted to destroy Lolita. He was on his way to the incinerator, but Vera stopped him."
Nabokov's wish to have his work destroyed was not the only case of literary self-sabotage. Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all his unpublished work, including "The Trial."
But instead the book was published posthumously.
There has been huge speculation about the contents of "The Original of Laura" and its quality.
Shapiro, who met Dmitry Nabokov several times, is one of the few who have had a glimpse.
"I happened to read that book several years ago, with Dmitry's kind permission. I don't remember the details," Shapiro said, "but had Nabokov had the time to complete the novel, it could have been his crowning achievement."
Dmitry Nabokov has also alluded to the potential greatness of the book.
In a BBC television interview in 2008, he said, "My father told me what his most important books were. He alluded to Laura as one of them. One doesn't refer to (a) book one intends to destroy.
"He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn't see death staring him in the face," Dmitry Nabokov told the BBC. "He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it."
What is not clear is how polished the unfinished book is or whether it could fail to meet the high standards of already published Nabokov novels.
In an interview with the BBC, Vladimir Nabokov himself discussed his unusual writing methods and perhaps gave ammunition to those who say the text is not ready for publication.
"I use these index cards, and I don't write consecutively, from the beginning to the next chapter, till the end," he said. "I just sort of fill in the gaps."
The speculation is that the novel contains even more sex than "Lolita," the story of an elderly, literary pedophile and a manipulative young girl.
Dmitry Nabokov says only that the story concerns a neurologist who has great intellect, but is physically unappealing, and contemplates suicide after becoming oppressed by his much younger wife's infidelity.
"Sex? Not much, that's not the point," he said.
Readers won't have to wait entirely until November 17. An extract is to be published on November 10 -- in Playboy magazine.
Maui wrote:New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009
I'd also like to point out that Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood is on this list.
Maui wrote:New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009
I'd also like to point out that Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood is on this list.
Tyrone_Shoelaces wrote:Feh, not a pop-up among them.
CHARLES McGRATH wrote:For some reason, the comic-book character Tintin, beloved just about everywhere else, has never quite caught on in America. This may change in 2011, when Steven Spielberg brings the first of three planned Tintin adventures to the movie screen, but for now he remains underappreciated — a little too odd and earnest, perhaps, in a landscape ruled by superheroes.
Tintin, a virginal, 15-year-old journalist with a perpetually upswept quiff of reddish-blond hair and a wire-haired fox terrier named Snowy, is the hero of 23 book-length adventures — what we now call graphic novels — completed by the Belgian artist Hergé, who died in 1983 at the age of 75. Most of them are little masterpieces of the form, combining inventive and suspenseful comic storytelling with drawings that are clear, precise and as thrilling as movie stills. Andy Warhol was a big fan, and so was Roy Lichtenstein.
Regrettably, though Pierre Assouline summarizes the books in great detail, his biography of their creator, “Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin,” is unillustrated, so if you don’t already know the work, this is not the place to start. And even if you do, the story is a little depressing. Hergé here is frequently reminiscent of the Charles Schulz depicted in David Michaelis’s recent biography: an artist far happier and more interesting in his work than he ever was in life. Mr. Assouline, a journalist and film producer who has also written a biography of Georges Simenon, manages to misspell Schulz’s name and also that of the great Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, but is generally judicious and fair, determined to make his subject sympathetic. Ultimately, though, he reveals far more about Hergé’s publishing life and business affairs than about what made him tick.
thomasgaffney wrote:The Corrections was a great read (thanks for the recommendation, Maui!). And probably one of the best I've read in the past 10 years.
The Todd wrote:Holy shit, this made The Todd ipampilash.....
Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author
Haruki Murakami - People who like good music.
stereosforgeeks wrote:Haruki Murakami - People who like good music, cats, Cutty Sark, wells and lemon drops.
Maui wrote:stereosforgeeks wrote:Haruki Murakami - People who like good music, cats, Cutty Sark, wells and lemon drops.
I've modified the above statement slightly.
You did know that Murakami owned a jazz bar for many years (see The Trilogy of the Rat).
Autobiography:
Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
Edmund White, City Boy, Bloomsbury
Biography:
Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)
Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)
Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)
Criticism:
Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)
Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)
Fiction:
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
Michelle Huneven, Blame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)
Nonfiction:
Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)
Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remain (Random House)
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)
Poetry:
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
D.A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Joan Acocella
Finalists:
Michael Antman
William Deresiewicz
Donna Seaman
Wendy Smith
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Joyce Carol Oates
The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.
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