I’ve been reading a lot of fall previews lately, and while they’ve tipped me off to/reminded me of a lot of awesome books coming out soon (big hitters: Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Updike. personal favorites: Stewart O’Nan), they seem to concentrate mostly on hardcovers, missing a lot of amazing paperback originals coming out soon. Here are some of our books I’m excited about:
Broken (Harper Perennial): Narrated by an 11-year-old girl in a coma, a brilliantly observant, darkly funny debut novel about a British suburb upended by petty lies, malignant indifference, and one just-plain-awful family’s penchant for violence. (I took that straight from the catalog copy, but hey, I write the catalog copy, so I’m allowed.)
Who By Fire (Harper Perennial): “Impossible to put down . . . a remarkable tale about fear and forgiveness and the bonds that hold a family together even as its members are falling apart.” —Aryn Kyle
21st Century Voices (Harper Perennial): Joyce Carol Oates picks the best contemporary short stories.
The Book of Lists: Horror (Harper Paperbacks): A compendium of all things macabre and mysterious. I already read this one and it’s the best thing ever if you are obsessively into horror movies as I am.
Love the cover. Love the title. Now so does Library Journal:
“The stories, published in tawdry men’s magazines during the late 1950s and early 1960s, are formulaic—all feature a tough guy and a stacked blonde robobabe whose clothes can barely contain her centerfold goodies. There’s gratuitous sex, violence, and often hilarious breast descriptions galore, along with booze, smokes, gunplay, and murder. This collection must be viewed as a thing of its politically incorrect time, but if your taste runs to cheap detectives, cheaper crooks, and D-cup damsels, One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is for you. Recommended.”
I can’t wait to read some of those “hilarious breast descriptions.”
Matt Logelin’s blog makes me cry at my desk every time I read it. He became a single dad back in March when his wife died the day after giving birth to their daughter Madeline. But his blog is not sappy, not saccharine; it’s the starkness and sadness that get me every time.
The producers of a new Bollywood film called Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrorsare being sued by Warner Bros, which claims that it’s a little too close to Harry Potter for their liking. The Bollywood producers, however, claim it’s a total coincidence, because their movie is actually about “an Indian boy left home alone, who fights off burglars when his parents go away on vacation,” a plot that is of course far closer to Home Alone.
Bollywood movies that copy American movies are not uncommon (I’ve had Holiday, the Bollywood remake of Dirty Dancing, on my Netflix queue for a while now), but, based on the poster art below, it seems like the sanctity of Harry Potter is safe.
“Wings can form through poor grooming, a genetic defect or a hereditary skin condition.”
(from an article in the Daily Mail called Ready for takeoff, Tiddles?
I’ve had this neat article from the Guardian about how you can tell a lot about a country from its bestseller list bookmarked for a while to share. At the end, the author references Feuchtgebiete a bestselling German novel, and says “I’m not sure you’ll want to know what Feuchtgebiete means, or indeed what it reveals about Germany.” Then there’s a wikipedia link.
Feuchtgebiete, not only a bestselling novel in Germany but the world’s bestselling novel in March 2008 (not sure if that’s a verifiable fact), has one of the more interesting plotlines I’ve ever heard of. Click on the link, I’m not sure I can do it justice.
Laurence Urdang, language expert who edited dictionaries, dies at 81
“Mr. Urdang — he had a middle name, his daughter Nicole said, ‘but he would not rest peacefully if it appeared in print’ . . . [his] view of language was that of an enjoyer, someone who delighted in its flexibility and invention, rather than that of a guardian always on alert against violations of precedent.”
That’s the slogan of the Lomographic Society, a group dedicated to the art of the snapshot. They’ve partnered with Urban Outfitters on Urban Nomad, an international photography competition where anyone can vote and where the grand prize winner will win the opportunity to have their lomographic shot made into wallapaper and sold at UO. I recommend browsing through the gallery—some of the photos are awe-inspiring, some are beautiful, some are shitty, but together they create a “snapshot portrait of our planet,” which is lomography’s goal. Some of my favorites (post yours in the comments!):
An article about one of my favorite sites, Cute Overload, and the success of their new page-a-day calendar. When I am having a bad day, there is nothing like looking at pictures of kittens to remind me that there are more important things in the world than whatever might be going on at my desk. Things like kittens. And puppies.
Larry Doyle’s I Love You, Beth Cooper has just been named as one of three finalists for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, “the nation’s highest recognition of the art of humor writing.” One of the judges had this to say about our esteemed Mr. Doyle:
“Clearly Larry Doyle was not the BOMC (“Big Man on Campus” for those of you who have suppressed the Eighties.) Had Larry been cool, he could have never written I Love You, Beth Cooper, a hilarious yet painfully accurate account of high school in all its pimply glory.”
I can vouch for that; I read ILYBC way back when it was in manuscript form and loved it then. I’m also looking forward to the movie in March 2009, though I’m not 100% convinced that Hayden Panettiere can pull of the character of Beth Cooper, who, as Larry writes her, is more than just a pretty, popular girl.
The creators of Lost have set up a site that lists all of the books related to the show’s universe, whether they’ve been mentioned in dialogue, shown in scenes, or are just a part of the Lost mythos. Viewers/readers can check out the books and then discuss them on the show’s message boards. Producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse don’t promise that any of these books offer clues, but hope that people will “pickup any of them and experience the richness of storytelling, character, and theme, and then allow your imagination to connect all that back into our show.”
The books include Aldous Huxley’s The Island, available from Harper Perennial, as well as a wide range of others including Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret? by Judy Blume (though they spell her name Bloom. Sacrilege!!!!) Just another reason why tv is awesome—it’s getting people to read!
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