Archive: August 2009 (1-10 of 31)

Aug 31 2009 12:29 PM ET

Alice Munro withdraws her name from Giller Prize contention: Good idea?

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Alice-Munro_lLooks like Alice Munro might have too much generosity: It was officially confirmed today that the beloved Canadian author had withdrawn her latest story collection, Too Much Happiness, from contention for the Giller Prize (think: Canada’s National Book Award). Her reason? According to her publisher, the 78-year-old writer had already won the award twice (for 1998′s The Love of a Good Woman and 2004′s Runaway) and was hoping to give younger writers a chance to nab the prize. Say it with me: “Aww.” To be frank, I’m surprised that any author would remove his or her name from awards consideration, if only because even a nomination would drum up an enormous amount of publicity for a book. But could an author really be this selfless? Could we imagine, say, perennial Emmy winner Tony Shalhoub just deciding to sit it out because he’s won enough statuettes?

Do you think Munro made the right decision? Or could all authors, best-selling or no, use the publicity the award brings?

Photo credit: Paul Hawthorne / AP Images

Aug 31 2009 10:10 AM ET

Hollywood screenwriters keep pulp (short) fiction alive

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The short stories in places like The New Yorker can be lovely, evocative pieces — but they don’t usually involve an insanely jealous trapeze artist or a serial killer escaping from the back of an FBI agent’s sedan during an earthquake. That’s a pity. But pulpy, plot-driven tales about circus artists and killers (and killer circus artists) are the main offering at Popcorn Fiction, a month-old literary site where a bunch of Hollywood screenwriters are trying to revive a languishing genre, one story at a time. As with most anthologies, the stories are a mixed bag. But early highlights include “Lightning in a Bottle,” a variation on the old saw about a jazz musician (this time a drummer) who sells his soul to a mysterious stranger for the perfect jam, by Craig Mazin (a co-writer of Scary Movie 3 and 4), and “A Best Friend Named Rick,” about a newly sprung ex-con struggling to stay straight, by Nichelle D. Tramble (a story editor on the NBC drama Mercy).

The idea for Popcorn Fiction grew out of one screenwriter’s love for old-fashioned storytelling. “I had been listening to satellite radio and I started listening to these old great ’50s radio programs like X Minus One, The Shadow, and Have Gun Will Travel,” says site founder Derek Haas, an L.A.-based scribe whose credits (with writing partner Michael Brandt) include 2007′s 3:10 to Yuma and 2008′s Wanted. “And I thought, nobody writes these kinds of things anymore, or if they do, they’re not easy to find. So I started knocking the idea around with some screenwriting friends and said, ‘What if I started commissioning screenwriters to write short stories?’”

Haas, who’s collected stories mostly by word of mouth and says he is not (yet) seeking general submissions, posts a new tale on the site roughly once a week. This week’s new entry: “Hours,” set in a hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, by Eric Heiserer (2010′s A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot). In coming weeks, Haas promises a yarn by Emmy winner Leslie Bohem (Dante’s Peak, TV’s Taken), a “funny little vampire story” by actor-comedian Patton Oswalt (Big Fan), and a crime tale by Oscar winner Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River).

You might think that Haas and his screenwriting pals would use the site to fish for movie deals. You’d be right. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer just bought Haas’ own story “Shake,” an adrenaline-charged but implausibly over-the-top thriller about an FBI agent with Parkinson’s chasing a serial killer during an earthquake in L.A. (Check it out here.) Curiously for a website founder, though, Haas has no plans to profit from Popcorn Fiction: Authors maintain all copyrights to their material. “I’m trying to help writers push new ideas in such a tough spec market,” says Haas, whose second novel, Columbus — a sequel to his 2008 thriller, The Silver Bear — is due in bookstores this November. “Every day you read on Ain’t It Cool News or one of those sites that Hollywood has run out of ideas, that all they can do is take these old films or these old TV shows and make them into movies. And I’m like, Wait. There’s a way to get new ideas into the system.” Now the rest of us don’t need to wait for a studio greenlight to see some of these ideas come to life on the screen — our computer screens, anyway.

Aug 28 2009 10:55 AM ET

'Bright Lights, Big City' gets a facelift after 25 years

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bright-lights-covers_lYou may be surprised to learn it’s been 25 years since the first appearance of Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s seminal debut novel about a hedonistic urban yuppie in mid-’80s Manhattan. You have fresh reason to ponder the passage of time next month when Vintage Contemporaries begins relaunching some of its early hits with new designs (in addition to Bright Lights, the imprint introduced classics like Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter and Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero as paperback originals). Designer John Gall has reconceived the first-edition covers, often playing with the original artwork, for 21st-century readers. In the new Bright Lights cover, you can see that the downtown nightspot Odeon is still in operation — though you don’t  learn anything about the current price of coke (and you sure hope you can forget about the dreadful film adaptation starring a seriously miscast Michael J. Fox).

Seeing the original Bright Lights again may remind you just how much life in New York — not to mention American literature — has changed in the last quarter century. In an essay in EW five years ago, McInerney noted that “New York is cleaner and far more prosperous and frankly duller” than it was when his book first appeared. The author went on to write: “I was sitting at the bar at the Odeon last week, a restaurant where I logged a lot of hours in the early ’80s. The place is featured on the cover of Bright Lights, Big City. The artwork depicts a young man, my fictional alter ego, standing next to the Odeon, looking up at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Hip restaurants generally have a brief life span, and the way I was living back then — let’s just say I wouldn’t have sold myself life insurance. I never could have imagined that 20 years later only the two of us would be left standing.”

Aug 27 2009 03:58 PM ET

Ian Rankin's new graphic novel: Inspector Rebus, meet John Constantine

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Fans of Scottish thriller writer Ian Rankin’s bestselling Inspector Rebus series will be curious and happy, I think, with Rankin’s new foray into the graphic novel. He’s written a down-and-dirty look at reality TV in Dark Entries, published in hardcover by DC Comics’ Vertigo Crime imprint.

While Rebus doesn’t appear in Dark Entries, Rankin has tackled a similarly smart/cynical/wisecracking character here, one familiar to fans of the comic book Hellblazer: the dour, chain-smoking detective who dabbles in the occult, John Constantine. The clever plot involves Constantine hired by the producers of a hit reality show called Haunted Mansions because the set appears to be, well, haunted.

What results is a locked-room mystery that owes a little to Agatha Christie, black-and-white art by Werther Dell’Edera that is both comic-strip efficient and suitably noir. Rankin is that rare writer who can write lines like, “The mansion has been breached. Hell has broken in,” and not have them seem melodramatic, but, rather, tough-guy terse. That, plus the Scottish slang (“They can shove it up their jacksies”) makes Dark Entries a fun, frenetic read for the dark final days of summer.

Aug 26 2009 10:07 PM ET

Legacy: Dominick Dunne, an American original

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They don’t dominick-dunne-author_lmake lives like Dominick Dunne’s anymore. A movie producer and TV exec who then forged a late career as a best-selling author and journalist (and telegenic raconteur), Dunne, who died today in New York at age 83, was an American original. In his best work, he cast a cool, stylishly bespectacled eye on the national fascination with celebrity and high society — as well as the effect that crime and tragedy could wreak on that rarefied world.

But Dunne didn’t just write about the nexus of celebrity and crime, as he did in his witty Vanity Fair reports on the O.J. Simpson trial or Princess Diana’s death. He also lived it: While Dunne was composing his 1985 novel The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (inspired by a real society murder case from the 1950s), his 22-year-old daughter, Poltergeist actress Dominique Dunne, was murdered by her former boyfriend. (The culprit, John Sweeney, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served less than four years of a six-year sentence.)

Dunne traced his interest in celebrity to a childhood trip to L.A. with his aunt, but he spent much of his life hobnobbing with A-listers. His brother, John Gregory Dunne, became a noted novelist (and husband of the writer Joan Didion). He earned a Bronze Star for heroism in WWII’s Battle of the Bulge. As a student at Williams College, he appeared in plays with future Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim. He moved in Hollywood circles as a director, TV executive, and producer of movies like 1970′s The Boys in the Band. But after struggling in Hollywood, he found his true calling rather late in life as a writer: He published his first book, The Winners, in 1979.

Like Truman Capote, Dunne the writer/journalist was often as famous as his subjects. And like Capote, he could be quick with a cutting remark, as when he referred to record producer Phil Spector as “a drama queen, albeit straight.” But in all his books and articles, Dunne explored the obsession with fame in late-20th-century American culture. And with all his inside-the-velvet-rope connectedness, he managed to embody it as well.

Peter Kramer/AP Images

Aug 26 2009 10:20 AM ET

Spot the 'Mad Men' anachronism! Or just look it up

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mmoedFans of AMC’s Mad Men know that the set decorators are usually slavishly faithful to the look and style of the early ’60s. But Sunday’s episode contained a glaring (and uncharacteristic) anachronism, as my friend, the lexicographer Ben Zimmer, noted yesterday on his Word Routes blog. Can you find it in the picture at left?

Yes, that’s The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary on the ledge behind the desk of Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), the Brit now serving as the chief financial officer at the ad firm Sterling Cooper. But as lexicographers and dedicated word-lovers know, the compact OED was first published in 1971 — well after Mad Men‘s current 1963 timeframe. Worse still, the three-volume compact OED in Pryce’s office didn’t appear until 1987.

The character himself  — or at least whoever oversees his Twitter account — responded late yesterday: “Regarding my office library, I was asked to hold onto those books by a nervous young man named McFly.” Perhaps the producers will be inspired to give Back to the Future‘s ’80s-era time traveler a significant role in upcoming Mad Men episodes. Is it only a matter of time before we see a Lost/Mad Men crossover?

Aug 26 2009 09:10 AM ET

Obama's vacation reading picks: How do they stack up?

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A confession: I just returned from a lovely two-week vacation, and I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t pick up one single book during my time off — not even while spending hours planted in a beach chair with nothing to look at but the Atlantic Ocean and elaborate gold jewelry of my fellow Jersey Shore vacationers. But since a good portion of my job entails burying myself in a book, I figured I deserved the break, right? Right? Well, I feel ever more ashamed of myself after discovering that President Obama packed five books in his suitcase for his Martha Vineyard vacay. And this is a man whose 9-5 involves, you know, trying to save the world and stuff.

But let’s look at his list to make sure our prez is being swayed in the right direction at his local Barnes & Noble. According to deputy press secretary Bill Burton, Obama brought along George Pelecanos’ 2009 novel The Way Home; Tom Friedman’s 2008 environmental manifesto Hot, Flat, and Crowded; Richard Price’s 2008 thriller Lush Life; Kent Haruf’s 1999 novel Plainsong; and David McCullough’s 2001 biography John Adams. I have to say, I’m impressed with Obama’s attention to fiction — presidents like George W. Bush tended to focus on nonfiction titles like James L. Swanson’s Manhunt and David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter. Or so says Karl Rove, who last year wrote in the Wall Street Journal about his yearly reading contest with the then-president — Rove won every time.

Tell me, how does Obama’s vacation reading stack up against your own? Do you applaud his beach-reading choices, or should he have thrown in a Nicholas Sparks novel like seemingly everyone else on my beach?

Aug 25 2009 11:46 AM ET

Oprah's new Book Club pick: Let the guessing game begin!

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oprah_lLate last night, Oprah Winfrey tweeted that she will be announcing her new Book Club selection on Friday, Sept. 18 and that she’s “never made a selection like ‘this’.” Ron Hogan at MediaBistro’s GalleyCat blog has already begun snooping on Amazon and BN.com to guess the title based on his knowledge of the publisher (Little, Brown) and the suggested retail prices ($23.99 in hardcover and $14.99 in trade paperback). His best guesses: James Collins’ 2008 debut novel Beginner’s Greek and Uwem Akpan’s remarkable 2008 story collection Say You’re One of Them (which EW’s Jennifer Reese ranked the best fiction title of last year). Akpan, a Nigerian-born priest who writes eloquently and movingly about the harrowing effects of AIDS and genocide on Africa, would seem to be a perfect author for Winfrey given her long-standing interest in the continent. (She has opened two schools for South African youth.) One thing’s for sure: The folks at Little, Brown, which is anomalously flush as the publisher of Stephenie Meyer, must be very happy campers.

Aug 24 2009 03:27 PM ET

'New' Agatha Christie story: Secret inspiration for 'Inglourious Basterds'?

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Last week, London’s Daily Mail printed a previously unpublished Hercule Poirot story by Agatha Christie from 1939, “The Capture of Cerberus.” The story hit the same day that Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds landed in theaters, a curious coincidence since both imagine the same ahistorical event: the assassination of Adolf Hitler. (A belated shout-out to Sarah Weinman’s Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog for tipping me off about this.)

In Christie’s story, Hitler is a war-mongering dictator named “August Hertzlein” and Poirot is approached by the father of a Nazi soldier who he believes has been falsely accused of killing the leader at “a monster meeting of the Brothers of Youth.” Unlike the celebratory fantasy of Hitler’s assassination in Tarantino’s Basterds, Christie has a far darker read on the same imagined occurrence: “With dismay, the peace lovers realised that Hertzlein’s death had accomplished nothing. Rather, it had hastened the evil day.” Moreover, as A.N. Wilson notes in his introduction to the story, “Christie expresses the naive hope that Hitler could have been converted to Christianity and begun preaching love and peace.” It’s no wonder that the Strand magazine rejected Christie’s story when it was submitted in 1939 as one piece of her “Labours of Hercules” series featuring the Belgian detective Poirot. (Christie later used the title “The Capture of Cerberus” for a completely different short story in 1947.)

This is one two unpublished Poirot stories discovered by writer John Curran in 70 some blue-lined notebooks that Christie left behind after her death in 1976. (HarperCollins is publishing Curran’s Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks next month.) Almost as fascinating as the new story is A.N. Wilson’s thoughtful introduction in the Daily Mail, defending Dame Agatha against “literary snobs.” It’s fun to imagine a conversation between Christie and Tarantino. Both are popular entertainers who disdain the highbrow. Both are keen students of narrative structure — though Tarantino usually finds a way to subvert it. But I suspect that only Christie ever chloroformed (lightly) a hedgehog that got trapped in a tennis net in order to set it free.

Aug 21 2009 11:00 AM ET

'Blackest Night Superman': The Man of Steel as a zombie?

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This week’s smartest, grisliest mainstream comic book is the first issue of Blackest Night: Superman. It’s part of the Blackest Night miniseries I wrote about a few weeks ago centering around Green Lantern, but in the Superman edition, writer James Robinson has the Man of Steel, infected by this miniseries’ Black Lantern, turn into a kind of zombie-Superman, a bizarre (as opposed to Bizarro), back-from-the-dead-and-angry Superman who digs up the grave of his own father, among other very bad things. Even Krypto the Super-Dog gets hurt in this issue.

Really, these Blackest Night titles (last week’s Blackest Night: Batman was a good ‘un, too) combine the best elements of both superhero comics and horror comics, along with some fine storytelling by Robinson, Peter Tomasi, and the miniseries’ guiding force, Geoff Johns. You don’t have to be a hardcore, know-every-detail-of-the-mythology fan to hop on this train. Check them out.

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