Little, Brown Books for Young Readers announced this afternoon that they will be publishing a new four-book series for teens by Lemony Snicket—his first since the phenomenally successful A Series of Unfortunate Events—as well as a YA novel from Daniel Handler, Snicket’s alter ego. “I was distressed to learn that Little Brown Books for Young Readers would also be offering the works of Lemony Snicket and have insisted that my book be published first. No one knows better than I that his writing delves into dangerous material, and inspires a spectrum of villainous reaction. In fact, I think I hear a nefarious knocking at the door right now!” Handler said. Handler’s novel is due out in 2011; the first Snicket, in 2012.
Archive: November 2009 (21-30 of 31)
Nov 11
2009
06:02 PM ET
Nov 11
2009
11:37 AM ET
The best comic-book team-up of the week: 'Batman/Doc Savage Special'
Get to the comic-book store today for Batman/Doc Savage Special #1, written by the top-notch Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets). What makes this hero pairing interesting is that it combines one of the best-known superheroes with one of the least-known ones — these days, that is.
Back in the 1930s and ’40s, Doc Savage was a superstar hero of pulp novels, over 180 of them, many written by Lester Dent, who always wrote with a headlong momentum. (Want to know how to write as prolifically as Dent? Read his “Secret Master Plot” advice. You’re welcome.)
By teaming Batman with Doc Savage, Azzarello and artist Phil Noto have created a kind of anti-superhero book. Which is to say, neither of these men possess super powers. They are highly skilled, trained, big-brained, big-muscled guys.
Batman/Doc Savage Special is a swift, clever murder mystery wrapped in an adventure tale.
Read it, and tell me what you think.
Nov 10
2009
12:32 PM ET
Exclusive: Clip from new David Sedaris audiobook
Humorist David Sedaris is famous for his reading tours, where he likes to test and hone his pieces, and engage in banter and back-and-forth with his audiences. EW has learned that Hachette Audio will release a new Sedaris audiobook on Nov. 24. Live for Your Listening Pleasure—consisting of recordings culled from his recent American tour—will have no hardcover or paperback counterpart.”This was planned as an audio initiative,” says a Hachette spokeswoman. “It’s patterned after Live At Carnegie Hall”—a popular 2002 recording—”and though we first thought it would be a single event, he preferred to cobble together highlights form the entire tour.” You can hear an exclusive clip here:
Nov 9
2009
04:14 PM ET
Talking Books: Week of 11/9
Wondering where all the authors are? Talking Books is here with another week of the write stuff.
11/9
Dennis Lehane, The Given Day, on the Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson (CBS, 12:35 a.m. EDT)
Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, on Tavis Smiley (PBS, check local listings)
11/10
Tony Hendra, Last Words coauthor w/ George Carlin, on Talk of the Nation (NPR, check local listings)
Serena Williams, On the Line, on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart (Comedy Central, 11 p.m. EDT)
11/11
Andre Agassi, Open: An Autobiography, on the Late Show With David Letterman (CBS, 11:35 p.m. EDT)
Clarence Clemons, Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales, on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart (Comedy Central, 11 p.m. EDT)
Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, on The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 11:30 p.m. EDT)
11/13
Stephen King, Under the Dome, on The View (ABC, 11 a.m. EDT)
Nov 7
2009
03:50 PM ET
Hugh Hefner... cartoonist?
If you only know him as the old duffer in his pyjamas on The Girls Next Door, get a copy of the pop-culture journal Royal Flush, which contains a fascinating, surprising interview with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner about his love of comics and cartoonists.
I always knew that from the start of Playboy, Hefner personally chose the cartoons the magazine ran, and developed a stable of great artists such as Harvey Kurtzman (one of the key instigators of MAD Magazine) and Jack Cole (the creator of Plastic Man), paying top fees that could compete with publications like The New Yorker and Esquire. I also knew that, flush with the success of Playboy in the late 1950s, he bankrolled a gloriously doomed project, Trump, the first full-color comics magazine. (It lasted only two issues.)
But the Royal Flush interview is a small treasure-trove of information. Hefner tells interviewer (and Flush publisher) Josh Bernstein that by the time he was 16, he was drawing himself in autobiographical comics (reproduced here), using the character-name “Goo Heffer.” (It was also at this age, he says, that he started calling himself “Hef.” I’d daresay no one before the advent of hiphop had the wit and cajones to give himself a cool nickname that would be picked up and used by everyone who wrote about him.)
The Royal Flush interview glows with Hefner’s enthusiasm for comic art, and, clearly recognizing that Bernstein is a sympathetic interviewer, Hefner allowed him to reprint the suicide note that Jack Cole wrote him shortly before killing himself in 1958. (For a portrait of the great, tortured Cole, try finding a copy of Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd’s Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stressed To Their Limits.)
These days, if anyone thinks about Playboy cartoons, they might recall the slinky, gauzy drawings of Vargas or the madcap adventures of Kurtzman and Will Elder’s wiggly Little Annie Fanny (right).
But as Royal Flush makes clear, Hefner was both an important patron of comic artists and a fan with an expert eye. I wish that, instead of wasting more videotape on The Girls Next Door, someone would make a documentary about Hefner’s place in the history of cartooning.
In the meantime, this Royal Flush interview will have to do, and does so handsomely.
Nov 6
2009
03:34 PM ET
National Bookstore Day is here!
Remember bookstores? You know, those places that are like libraries, but with commerce involved. (Come to think of it, remember libraries?)
OK, while we aren’t quite at the point where the electronic marketplace has eclipsed the physical one, it is true that independent bookstores have been struggling for a long while. And now with the deadly Pricing War of 2009 in full swing, they’re taking yet another hit.
So, as a way to honor these burrows for bookworms, Publishers Weekly has declared tomorrow “National Bookstore Day.” Over 140 booksellers around the country will be involved in the nationwide promotion trying to remind people just how special independent bookstores can be. Amazon doesn’t let you peruse 18 miles of shelving like the Strand bookstore in New York. Try asking Walmart to let you stay the night in their facilities in exchange for work like Paris’ Shakespeare and Company does. They’ll probably laugh and rollback your butt out the door.
It’s a clarion call for bibliophiles everywhere to patronize any place where you can get a reading recommendation that hasn’t been spat out of an algorithm that somehow thinks that if you liked The Hotel New Hampshire, you’ll also enjoy a Hannah Montana box set. Any place where purchasing literature does not necessarily require a frozen mocha latte and raspberry hazelnut pirouettes. Any place where the books aren’t located across the aisle from the margarita makers and sold by the pound. Heed it and browse.
Nov 5
2009
04:13 PM ET
Modernizing Shakespeare
If William Shakespeare were around today it’s unclear whether he’d have made it as a playwright. My guess is that he’d probably be credited as “Will Shakes,” and would be penning Off-Off-Broadway plays about the Iraq War and submitting spec scripts to Mad Men. So it’s lucky for us that he lived when he lived.
But that doesn’t stop filmmakers from bringing his work into the present day. The Hollywood Reporter has reported that Gerard Butler will be joining Ralph Fiennes in a contemporary adaptation of one of the lesser-produced Shakespearean tragedies, Coriolanus.
This isn’t the first time Shakespeare’s works have gotten a modern makeover. In fact it’s more like the 12,486th. So let’s take this opportunity to look back at the slew of attempts to bring the Bard up to date:
There is, of course, Baz Luhrmann’s version of Romeo & Juliet featuring the PYTs of the MTV generation: Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. It’s a good thing this was made in 1996 before cell phones were so ubiquitous. READ FULL STORY »
Nov 3
2009
02:55 PM ET
'Twilight' parody 'Nightlight' excerpt: An EW exclusive!
Nightlight — the Harvard Lampoon’s first novel parody in since 1969′s Bored of the Rings — features the “pallid” Belle Goose, who falls for Edwart Mullen on the first day of school in her new hometown, Switchblade: “Looking into his eyes I felt waves of electricity, currents of electrons charging towards me … Caught in his ionized hypnosis, the old adage came to mind: Beautiful enough to kill, gut, stuff, and frame above your fireplace.
The book goes on sale tomorrow, but you can read the first chapter exclusively on EW.com.
Nov 2
2009
12:01 PM ET
I read Jodie Sweetin's book so you won't have to
Jodie Sweetin—Stephanie on Full House—has released a memoir, Unsweetened, in which she talks about her acting career, her addiction problems, her two marriages, and her daughter, Zoie. She says herself in the introduction that there are “things that I’m too horrified to tell anyone,” but the book does seem more painfully honest and unairbrushed than most celebrity autobiographies. Here are the high—or rather, the low—points:
Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen were not very nice to her on the Full House set. Once, when Sweetin was coping with the embarrassment of a tooth coming in crooked, one of the twins turned to her and said, “Why do you have a tooth growing out of there?”
She had her first drink at 14 and was smoking pot at 15. When the cops stopped her and a carload of friends for toilet-papering someone’s house, a very drunk Sweetin “literally fell out of the car and started puking everywhere.”
By college she’d moved on to Ecstasy, and then cocaine; by the time she married at 20, she began to experiment with meth. When she attended the LA premiere of New York Minute, a Mary Kate and Ashley film, in May 2004, she writes, “I knew I couldn’t last a New York minute without doing more meth. I had it in my purse, with a straw, in a little baggie inside a lip-gloss container. READ FULL STORY »
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