Image Credit: Barry Wetcher
If trends come in cycles, maybe it’s time to bring Miranda Priestly, Andrea Sachs, and the “clackers” at Runway magazine out of the fashion closet. EW has learned exclusively that author Lauren Weisberger is working on Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, a sequel to her debut novel The Devil Wears Prada. Simon & Schuster will be publishing the follow-up in April 2013 — 10 years after the release of the original. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Joe Kohen/Getty Images
We already reported back in April that Stephen King was going back to his horror thriller roots with a novel called Joyland, but this morning the relatively young publisher Hard Case Crime — established in 2004 — announced that it will be releasing it come June 2013. According to the official announcement, Joyland is set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in the early ’70s. College student Devin Jones arrives to work as a carny but finds himself confronting the “legacy of a vicious murder” and the “fate of a dying child.” If there’s anything scarier than a murderous, dimension-hopping clown — It scarred me for life — it’s a small-town carny in any form. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Carl Court – WPA Pool/Getty Images
With the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee officially commencing this weekend, the royal family is in the news more than ever — with the exception, of course, of that little wedding last year.
Today, another nugget of info about the Queen Elizabeth’s personal life came out: She’s named a litter of Labradors after Harry Potter. Royals: They’re just like us. According to MSN, the Queen named one of the dogs “Gryffindor” which of course is one of the four Hogwarts houses, and not the name of an actual character from the books. No word on whether there is a Hufflepuff dog as well, which, being the house that is loyal and true, seems a perfect match for a canine pal. Gryffindor is the only name so far that is being reported, but one has to assume Sirius Black made the cut. This isn’t the first time the Queen has shown her Potter love. In 2006, J.K. Rowling helped the Queen celebrate her 80th birthday.
Read more:
New ‘Harry Potter’ box set to be released
Original ‘Harry Potter’ manuscript goes on tour
‘Harry Potter’ books to be part of Kindle lending service
Professional heartstring-tugger Mitch Albom has written a new novel that might appear to veer away from his usual style, but The Time Keeper (out Aug. 28) does touch upon his go-to themes. Albom’s fiction and nonfiction books — the most famous of which is the 1997 best-seller Tuesdays with Morrie — typically center on death and loss, and his previous novels, The Five People You Meet in Heaven and For One More Day, have dealt with the afterlife and some supernatural elements. The Time Keeper is the legend of Father Time — not as a bearded scythe-wielder, but as a young boy. Sound interesting? Fans of Albom can check out the exclusive cover (left) and first excerpt below! READ FULL STORY »
Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone — the first novel in a trilogy — centered on a blue-haired girl named Karou who encounters unusual creatures and dangerous angels as she travels the world on mysterious errands.
Now the sequel, Days of Blood and Starlight, is slated for a Nov. 6 release. It picks up where the best-selling Daughter left off. From the official description: “In this stunning sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Karou must come to terms with who and what she is, and how far she’ll go to avenge her people. Filled with heartbreak and beauty, mysteries and secrets, new characters and old favorites, Days of Blood and Starlight brings the richness, color and intensity of the first book to a brand new canvas.”
Judging from Daughter of Smoke and Bone — which EW’s Sara Vilkomerson called a “smartly plotted, surprising, and fiercely compelling read” — the sequel is well worth getting excited about. Check out a larger version of the brand new cover below! READ FULL STORY »
You can’t hide behind your Kindles forever, Fifty Shades lovers. The infographic artists at Goodreads have compiled user data to determine the states most enamored of sexy billionaire kinkmaster Christian Grey. Utah, one of the states where Twilight rates highest, is lily white on this map, and in Georgia — where several libraries have banned the BDSM saga — the few who have read it are also big fans. As a New Yorker, I’m not sure how I feel about the stats showing that the Tri-State area — New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut — is the epicenter of E L James love. Check out Goodreads’ “Fifty States of Grey” map below!
It’s not the long-rumored Harry Potter encyclopedia, but there was more news today on the Potter front. Bloomsbury announced it will be releasing The Hogwarts Library Box Set later this year.
The set will contain Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through The Ages (both published together in 2001) and The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which was published a year after the final Harry Potter novel in 2008. READ FULL STORY »
For those of you anticipating Nov. 16th — the release of the final Twilight movie — with a mix of utmost dread and excitement, the good folks at Little, Brown will be releasing the definitive, lushly photographed tome to commemorate the record-breaking film series on Oct. 9. EW got the first peek at the cover and the scoop on what you can find inside — from the looks of it, you’ll have a hard time prying this must-have from a true Twihard’s cold, dead hands. Feast your eyes below! READ FULL STORY »
Grub Street editor Alyssa Shelasky is the ideal dinner partner. She’ll never bore you with a discussion of in-season ingredients or the best cuts of pork belly. She’d much rather talk about reality TV — “American Idol makes me hate humanity sometimes” — or about dating and sex. Her food philosophy is simple: “Food is what I eat when I’m hungry. I prefer it to be nice food and hopefully from a farm where good, healthy things are happening.”
I met Shelasky at Tertulia, a busy Spanish taverna in the West Village, for an early dinner to talk about Apron Anxiety, her new memoir based on her blog of the same name. It’s one of those recipes-sprinkled-through-the-narrative books, which could be grating if it weren’t so disarming and fun. Shelasky’s story begins with her upbringing in suburban Massachusetts and moves on to her booze-soaked 20s, during which she mingled with celebrities (including a pre-Giselle Tom Brady) while working as a New York-based reporter for US Weekly and People magazine. Her enviable lifestyle slowed down when she turned 30 and moved to Washington D.C. with her new celebrity chef boyfriend (referred to as “Chef” in the book, but you can figure out his real identity with a simple Google search). Her quieter life didn’t turn out to be the lovefest she was hoping for. Chef was working 16-hour days opening a new restaurant, and Shelasky struggled to find a place in his food-obsessed existence. Her usual joie de vivre and self-confidence faded, and this avowedly undomestic girl turned to cooking to fix her broken psyche. READ FULL STORY »
“In the Game of Food, you win, or you wash the dishes.” That’s the tagline of The Inn at the Crossroads, a food blog with a unique twist: Authors Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer are trying to cook every dish that appears in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. Well, almost every dish — the denizens of Westeros and beyond sometimes eat things that are illegal in the U.S. (horse meat, camel, dog) or downright horrifying (olives stuffed with maggots).
But Monroe-Cassel and Lehrer have triumphed over challenges like honey-spiced locusts and the mysterious “bowls of brown” served in Flea Bottom, as well as a score of more appetizing recipes (lemon cakes, anyone?) — and now they’ve taken their hobby to the next level. Next Tuesday, Bantam will release A Feast of Ice and Fire, a Game of Thrones-themed cookbook that has George R. R. Martin’s official seal of approval; he even wrote the tome’s poetic introduction. Before its release, EW called up Monroe-Cassel and Lehrer to chat about the challenges of cooking fictional food, weird medieval recipes, and which fantastical world they’d like to tackle next. Hint: It rhymes with “Larry Totter.”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What inspired you to start your blog?
Monroe-Cassel: We really wanted lemon cakes, and a Google search didn’t bring up anything that fit the almost reverent description of lemon cakes in the books. So naturally, we decided to try and make our own.
Research must have been a huge undertaking. Can you explain your process?
Monroe-Cassel: We basically try to do an historical and a modern take on each dish when possible — it can be anything from ancient Roman to Elizabethan. We’ll look at the description in the book and then we’ll go back in old cookbooks and try to find a description that fairly closely matches. The old recipes often don’t have quantities or very clear directions or temperatures or anything like that.
I’m imagining you two sitting in an enormous library, examining scrolls.
Monroe-Cassel: [Laughs] That would be the dream. I’m a classical history major, so I did put my dead language skills to work for some of the recipes. We’ve done a lot of library research and a lot of online research.
I guess you can find anything on the Internet.
Monroe-Cassel: It’s true. We got our crickets from Amazon.
It’s a little disappointing that the book doesn’t include a recipe for a pie filled with 100 live doves.
Monroe-Cassel: We get that a lot!
