Category: Book Trailers (31-37 of 37)

Sep 17 2009 11:46 AM ET

Exclusive! The trailer for 'The Van Alen Legacy,' Melissa de la Cruz's fourth Blue Bloods vampire novel

Often when fans talk about a book or TV show in the vampire genre, they feel the need to qualify their enjoyment by saying “It’s my guilty pleasure.” Not so with Melissa de la Cruz’s New York Times best selling Blue Bloods series. Sure, as we pointed out when teen protagonist Schuyler Van Alen made EW’s list of the 20 greatest vampires in pop culture, we may have come for the star-crossed lovers: The Blue Bloods are a society of ancient vampires who cycle through lifetimes bonded to the same person (when they find one another, the memories of their previous incarnations return), which means Schuyler’s romance with handsome Jack Force, who’s tied to Mimi (the meanest — and most entertaining — girl on New York’s Upper East Side) was never going to end well. But we stayed for the slow-build family and murder mysteries. The more Schuyler learns about her unique past and the return of the Silver Bloods, vampires who prey upon their Bluer cousins, the more we want to know. Which is why just the title of Book 4, The Van Alan Legacy, on shelves Oct. 6, got us excited. Now that we’ve seen the trailer — nice and moody à la the Mad Men opening credits — we’re thinking about pre-ordering. (If you haven’t read the series, start at the beginning.)

Aug 19 2009 09:05 AM ET

Libba Bray's 'Going Bovine': At least for her new book trailer!

If you’ve yet to pick up a book by young-adult author Libba Bray, you might after watching the trailer for Going Bovine, her smart, funny, layered new novel due out Sept. 22. The book, featured in EW’s annual Must List Issue, follows the epic journey of 16-year-old Cameron, who’s been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the human form of mad cow disease). The inspiration for the story, Bray tells EW, came many years ago, when her mother told her about a man from their hometown who had contracted the disease. “One of the symptoms that he had was hallucinations. He would see these flames shoot up in his field of vision. I was haunted by that, because I thought how horrible must it be when you can’t trust your reality. What is reality? Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not? Then it became this crazy cobb salad of all kinds of things that I’m interested in, like, theoretical physics, and microwave popcorn, and Disney World, and yard gnomes, and Norse mythology, and why are we here as opposed to why aren’t we there… or at Nordstrom?”

The trailer, featuring riffs by a cow suit-wearing Bray, is equally fantastic in its randomness. Our two favorite parts: “Boneless chicken” and “That says, to me, I’m marked for death.”

Aug 18 2009 02:55 PM ET

Robert Rave's 'Spin': A 'Devil Wears Prada' for straight guys -- or just a film vehicle for Zac Efron?

E! is reporting that Zac Efron — the possibly engaged star of High School Musical and 17 Again (or not, depending on what report you want to believe) — is interested in starring in a movie adaptation of Robert Rave’s just-published debut novel, Spin. The book seems to be a “distaff” version of the recent chick lit sub-genre about an innocent ingenue (preferably from the Midwest) who moves to Manhattan, goes to work for a shrewish boss in Big Media, and comes close to losing her soul in the process. The twist this time is that the ingenue is a guy, what the jacket calls “a corn-fed young man from the Midwest who stumbles into New York without a clue, a contact, or a proper wardrobe.” Though he’s (presumably) straight, his name is even gender-ambiguous: Taylor Green. I suppose if you’re going to make what seems for all the world like a chick flick but just happens to star a guy, Zac Efron is your ideal leading man. Remember that Devil Wears Prada star Anne Hathaway cut her teeth on Disney fare like the Princess Diaries movies.

By the way, the shrewish boss, a PR diva named Jennie Weinstein, is a stand-in for the controversial New York publicist and perennial Gawker.com punching bag Lizzie Grubman, for whom Rave toiled as an assistant nearly a decade ago. “Why would someone write a book about me when they worked for me such a long time ago?” Grubman tells EW’s David Yi about Spin. “If someone wants to write a book about me, fine. I’ll take it as a compliment.”

Like many recent books in the Devil Wears Prada vein, Spin isn’t just counting on a movie deal to spark reader interest. The book’s publisher, St. Martin’s, is also promoting the novel with a trailer. This one is a little more ambitious than most — it features four young actors playing out a scene from the book — though it pales in comparison to last year’s polished McG-directed clips for Celebutantes, another St. Martin’s novel, that one written by Amanda Goldberg (daughter of film producer Leonard Goldberg) and Ruthanna Khaligi Hopper (daughter of actor Dennis Hopper). The Celebutantes trailers set a perhaps impossibly high bar for the genre. They were spiffy enough to make me yearn for a TV series based on the book, if not drive me to the read the book itself. But this Spin trailer? I’m not sure it stirs my interest in either the book or a film that would squeeze Efron into a pair of pink Manolos.

Aug 13 2009 10:05 AM ET

Would you read a book just because these celebrities liked it?

I stumbled upon the website for Matthew Specktor’s forthcoming debut novel, That Summertime Sound, due out later this month from MTV Books. The coolest, most puzzling thing about the site: a series of five sound clips, excerpts from the book read by the most random assortment of famous folks imaginable. It’s like a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game run amok trying to guess what James Franco, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Irons, and Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis could possibly have in common. (Specktor also scored a glowing blurb from a legit book writer, Jonathan Lethem.) The novel seems to follow a 19-year-old guy from California in the mid-’80s who sets out on a road trip to follow his much beloved, unjustly obscure rock band — though, to be honest, I only know that from looking at the Amazon page on the book; the website (and the audio clips) are pretty vague on the actual plot. Of the clips, Jeremy Irons’ is the most noteworthy, with his hilariously rakish reading of lines like: “Every rock ‘n’ roll story needs the devil in it somewhere.” But I wonder: Do celebrity endorsements like these actually work, particularly for the target audience of a coming-of-age novel like this one?

Photo Credits: Freeman: Solarpix / PR Photos; Franco, Paltrow: Albert L. Ortega / PR Photos; Irons: Janet Mayer / PR Photos

Aug 11 2009 12:33 PM ET

Thomas Pynchon speaks! Author lends his voice to 'Inherent Vice' trailer

41786526So it turns out that Thomas Pynchon really does sound like The Dude from The Big Lebowski. Tracy Locke of The Penguin Press confirms that the reclusive author narrates the trailer for his new book, Inherent Vice, which we wrote about on Shelf Life yesterday. Of course, Simpsons fans might have recognized the voice from Pynchon’s memorable guest appearance — with a paper bag over his head — in a 2004 episode of the long-running Fox series. (In fact, the Wall Street Journal went so far as to send the Simpsons clip and a Pynchon-voiced German TV spot to a Michigan-based sound engineer and voice identification expert to help prove it’s Pynchon on the trailer.)

Although the text of the trailer’s voiceover is not from Inherent Vice, Locke says that Pynchon composed it himself. The trailer seems to channel the voice of the book’s hero, a stoner private eye in ’70s L.A. named Doc Sportello. Now the real question is: Does Pynchon also look like The Dude?

Aug 10 2009 09:31 AM ET

Thomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice': What were they smoking when they made the book trailer?

Last week, Penguin released a YouTube trailer for Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s new noirish mystery about a stoner P.I. in 1970s L.A. The result is, well, only groovyish. Low-budget without seeming cheap, the nearly three-minute clip presents a fun montage of actor-less scenes: well-shot images of driving along the Pacific coast in L.A. and the beach, with atmospheric close-ups of a red convertible, a black cat creeping along a low beach-side wall, etc. (That’s the general rule with book trailers: Unless you can tape a telegenic or media-savvy author on a camcorder, like another new Penguin trailer with Andrew Weil, it’s best not to hire actual actors.)

The only actor here is the voiceover artist, who seems to be channeling Jeff Bridges’ The Dude from The Big Lebowski, with all the gravel of a middle-aged pothead. Interestingly, it’s not the voice of Ron McLarty, the narrator of the audiobook version of Inherent Vice. Even more curious, it seems that none of the text of this trailer is from Pynchon’s book. I just scanned the first chapter and I can’t detect a single line that corresponds to Pynchon’s actual writing. And I’m not just talking about the cutish joke at the end about the narrator’s astonishment that the book costs $27.95 — “$27.95? That used to be, like, three weeks of groceries, man.” If you’re promoting a book by Thomas Pynchon, wouldn’t you want to put Pynchon’s words front and center — and not have someone summarize the book’s set-up in a Pynchon-like style?

Jul 27 2009 12:52 PM ET

Book trailers: New Jim Shepard story for 'Electric Literature' makes me forget how much I hate book trailers

I’m not usually a fan of book trailers, which are generally more slipshod than your average piano-playing cat video and considerably less entertaining. But this one — for a new short story by Jim Shepard (Project X) titled “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” — caught my attention. It’s included in a new ‘zine called Electric Literature, a bimonthly anthology of short stories that’s available in a unique multi-platform distribution system: You can pick up a paperback edition via print on demand ($9.95 from Amazon); or download a copy to your iPhone or Kindle ($4.95); or just read it online as an e-book ($4.95). The debut issue includes an excerpt from The Hours author Michael Cunningham’s forthcoming novel, Olympia, as well as stories by Lydia Millet (My Happy Life), T Cooper (Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes), Diana Wagman (Skin Deep). The trailer for “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” captures all the intrigue of a good NPR narrative piece and the spare wit of really strong animation.

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