May 23, 2010

• Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is now playing at the Moxie Cinema. 

• On n+1's newly redesigned website, Marco Roth has an excellent analysis of David Shields's new supposedly visionary new book Reality Hunger.

May 18, 2010

• Daniel Clowes has just released his first Wilson, his graphic novel of completely new material. 

• The film version of Stieg Larsson's very popular crime novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will be playing at the Moxie Cinema starting next week.  The reviews for the movie have been pretty great. 

April 9, 2010

• To coincide with the release of his new novel Solar, which in my opinion is just decent like Saturday rather than amazing like On Chesil Beach, here is a recap of Ian McEwan's most essential works.

• Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall edged out Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna in the final of The Tournament of Books, although it should be noted that noted partier Andrew W.K. voted for Kingsolver's novel. 

March 19, 2010

• Fantasy author Michael Moorcock gives the NY Times a Moorcock approved music playlist.

• The Morning News's NCAA coinciding Tournament of Books is underway.  I predict A Gate at the Stairs, despite being knocked out in the first round and thus not allowing me to know Andrew W.K.'s (!) thoughts on the book, will be brought back in the wild card round to win the tournament.  I also think that Andrew W.K. would've loved Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  Why are these people not choosing the books I want to see Andrew W.K. read?!?

February 14, 2010

• Crime fiction novelist Dennis Lehane is going to write and direct a film adaptation of his short story "Animal Shelter".  Presumably, Lehane is tired of seeing his works ruined by second rate filmmakers like Clint Eastwood, Ben Affleck and Martin Scorsese.    Lehane did write for the later seasons of The Wire, so he does have some script writing experience.

• Champion jockey turned crime novelist Dick Francis died on Sunday at the age of 89. 

• Wells Tower does NOT love T.C. Boyle's new story collection Wild Child.  Having read it last month, I can confirm it is not Boyle's strongest collection.  I'm partial to After the Plague, but Wild Child is an improvement over Tooth and Claw and does contain some solid stories.

January 11, 2010

• The Millions has put together an impressive list of upcoming works of literary fiction in 2010 including new novels from Joshua Ferris, Don Delillo, Yann Martel, Jonathan Franzen, Bret Easton Ellis's sequel to Less Than Zero and new translations of Roberto Bolano and Jose Saramago. 

• The New Yorker's new story Uwem Akpan "Baptizing the Gun" is free on their website.

   

Decemeber 18, 2009

• David Sedaris on his favorite books of 2009.

• Here is Walter Kirn writing about how the new George Clooney adaptation of his novel Up in the Air rescued his novel from eternal obscurity.  Kirn would have been better off had his novel Thumbsucker drifting off into obscurity than being adapted into the unwatchable mess that it became.  

• A must detested (at the Book Castle anyway) best of the decade list from the AV Club, in which my enemy Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City makes the list, but Bolano's 2666 goes unmentioned.  Madness. 

November 15, 2009

• Everything is Illuminated author Jonathan Safran Foer tries to claim Dave Eggers's crown as the most sincere young novelist with his new non-fiction work Eating Animals which examines the issues surrounding animal consumption. Here's a New Yorker review.

• Sarah Palin's book, which comes out on Tuesday and is going to sell a-kajillion copies, and those with advanced copies tell us that it contains no mention of that no-good-nick Levi. 

• Ozarks author Donald Harington died last week.  Harington was known for his surreal regional novels of the Ozarks. 

October 18, 2009

• Here's a longish Malcolm Gladwell piece in which he compares football and dogfighting that I haven't gotten around to reading yet because, I'm pretty sure the intent, is to make me feel like a monster for watching football (and for my love of dog fighting). 

• Yann Martel is cool and everything, but this is still pretty weird, right?  Every two weeks, Martel has sent Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper an inscribed book to read (not one of Martel's).  What Yann needs of for Karl Rove to challenge Harper to a read off, if he really wants to get pages turned. 

September 27, 2009

• This week The Millions compiled a list of the twenty best novels of the millenium so far and named Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections as the top book.  While Book Castle employees weren't buying that, we also didn't reach a consensus on the top book, but were in agreement that Middlesex (#16 on their list) was better.  No offense, Franzen.

• Next month the Moxie is going to be showing Bright Star a film about poet John Keats (which according to the rating includes "incidental smoking" huh?) which is receiving much better reviews than the reviews for John Krasinski's adaptation of DFW's Brief Inteviews With Hideous Men that came out this weekend. 

September 7, 2009

• Here's a trailer for Brief Interview With Hideous Men, Jim from The Office's adaptation of David Foster Wallace's collection of short stories. The film stars both of The Brothers Solomon--Will Arnett and Forte. 

• Robert Olen Butler's new high concept novel Hell sounds about as uneven as his high concept novel about the last thoughts of people after having their heads severed that I read this Summer. 

• The NY Times did a crazy-long story about Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers mission to adapt Where the Wild Things are into a full length film. 

August 9, 2009

• Terry Prachett, British author of the Discworld Series, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease is campaigning for a law that would allow assisted suicide in the UK. 

• According to recent tweets from Bret Easton Ellis's Twitter account (an account that it too bizarre not to be legit) he is really into Miley Cyrus, Joseph Gordon Levitt in (500) Days of Summer, is currently reading 2666 and Hellboy #5 Conqueror Worm and hated The Hangover.  Oh, and he says Bo Burnham is unbearable (which is absolutely true).

August 2, 2009

• Louis Menard reviews Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, which is out on Tuesday.

• Speaking of Pynchon, a few weeks ago the LA Times had a list of the sixty-one most essential postmodern novels. 

• After being dropped by its original publisher, Dustin Diamond (Screech!) re-sold his memoir about his experiences on Saved By The Bell.  Here's something crazy that the new publisher has to say about it:  This book is freaking incredible! Everyone that reads it loves it, and [it] is truly one of my favorites of all time."  How can I not buy this book? 

July 20, 2009

• Frank McCourt died on over the weekend. 

• Yann Martel's new Holocaust allegory gets him three million dollars. 

• Finally!  Christian vampire novels.

July 16, 2009

• According to Ridley Scott, science fiction is dead.  According to me, Scott hasn't made a really good movie in almost a decade, and he is responsible for G.I. Jane, so who cares what he thinks.  It's always annoying when artists declare a genre dead after they stop working in it.  In his defense, he has been too busy working on modern classics like A Good Year and Hannibal to realize that Battlestar Galacitca, Lost and Y: The Last Man were all created after the death of science fiction. 

• Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt may have only weeks to live. 

July 4, 2009

• Dave Eggers has a new book of nonfiction, Zeitoun, out this month.  McSweeney's is the worst at promoting their books and getting them on the shelves by the release date, so the book may be out now and it may be out in a few weeks, who knows, those dorks are too busy doing literarcy programs for disadvantaged youth or something.  I heard Eggers read part of this at the Printers Row Book Fair last month, and it sounds terrific.  Similar to What is the What as far as style.  Read an interview with Eggers about it here. 

• The Missouri Literary Festival has added some authors to their announced lineup including Brad Gooch author of the recent Flannery O' Connor biography Flannery that was a big hit with critics. 

June 19, 2009

• Jonathan Franzen has a new short in the new issue of New Yorker, which is available free online.  I haven't read it yet, but I'm told he continues to stick it to our lame, Midwestern values. 

• Speaking of East Coast elites, Jonathan Safran Foer has signed a deal with a visual book publisher for his next two books.  They will be released in June of 2010 and 2011. 

• Two biographies of David Foster Wallace have been proposed but only D.T. Max's, who wrote the New Yorker piece earlier this year, has sold.  Why so many Wallace biographies when no David Eddings biographies are being worked on?

• Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel Persepolis, thinks the Iranian election was a fraud.  (Warning: the link goes to an MTV news page, so there is an excellent chance you will be attacked with stories and pop up ads about Megan Fox and Lady Gaga).

June 4, 2009

• Sherman Alexie is sorry about wanting to punch a woman for owning a Kindle. 

• If only Sherman Alexie had read Dave Eggers's mass email, he wouldn't have been so bothered by the Kindle. 

• Fantasy author David Eddings has died at age 77. 

May 16, 2009

May 8, 2009

• Apparently there is not a single joker in Kelleys Island in Ohio because after the Big Read organizer David Kipen vowed to eat a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if the entire population did not read the novel, they all did it. 

• An interesting NY Times article about Peter de Jong one of the growing number of authors who are part of the James Patterson assembly line. 

May 2, 2009

• The Missouri Literary Festival has put up a new website.  The festival will take place October 2, 3, and 4 in Springfield and is going to be bringing a number of authors including poet Billy Collins and Daniel Woodrell. 

• After President Obama mentioned he was reading Joseph O' Neill's novel Netherland, Random House immediately ordered another 2,500 copies.  We have sold two since the mention, so I can attest to this Obama effect. Still, only more 2,500 copies?  Come on, Obama.  If Oprah had mentioned it, they would have printed twenty times that. 

April 27, 2009

• Despite his repeated claims to the contrary, in this interview Bret Easton Ellis doesn't seem to excited about how the film adaptation of The Informers turned out. 

• Tom Bissell's essay in the NYTimes about the David Foster Wallace posthumously published Kenyon commencement address This is Water argues that it "would take a small, charred heart to find any impure motives here".  While I don't object to the publication (despite the fact that the address is available free online), does it make my heart small and charred to find the $14.99 price (for essentially five or six full pages of text spread out over around 120 pages achieved by dividing the speech up to a sentence or two per page) and impure motives. 

• n+1 editor and much despised sad young literary man was temporarily arrested in Russia, and I can't tell if the photo that accompanies the article is a mugshot, a picture of him post-release, or a publicity still taken to demonstrate just how sad and dark his soul is: 

April 22, 2009

• Monday Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Olive Kitteridge.  Finalists were Louise Erdrich's The Plauge of Doves and Christine Schutt's All Souls.  I haven't read any of these, so my outrage not seeing my favorite novel from last year Charles Bock's Beautiful Children is completely based in ignorance, but I am outraged nonetheless!  W.S. Merwin won for his poetry collection The Shadow of Sirius which I also haven't read and the prize for Drama went to Ruined by Lynn Nottage which I haven't seen. The real scandal here though is, why, on the front page the Pulitzer website using MLA format for titles, but when you click on the individual pages it abandons MLA. 

• Is it dangerous to know too much about your favorite writer?  If you favorite writer is Flannery O'Connor maybe.  Perhaps it's best to know the writer is kind of a jerk from the beginning: 

April 20, 2009

• J.G. Ballard, author of cult favorites like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, died on Sunday at 78.  This continues a not very cool trend of death among the best SF and fantasy writers of the last generation over the last few years. The guy who writes all those Robotech books is still around though. 

• For the second time in recent years a jerk move by Hugo Chavez has turned a book into a best seller. I would appreciate if in the future Chavez could suggest a book we have plenty of copies of.  Might I recommend The Handmaid's Tale or Stephen King's The Dark Half. 

• Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson will be participating in the Public Affairs Conference on Sustainable Actions for a Sustainable Future at Missouri State University.  The conference is taking place April 21-24.  Robinson will be speaking on "Climate Change and the Pursuit of Happiness" on April 22 from 12-1:15.  More specifics here. 

April 18, 2009

• Chuck Palahniuk has announced a design contest for his new novel Pygmy, which comes out in May.  Hopefully this Operation Havoc guerilla marketing campiagn for a book about terrorism ends better than the Aqua Teen Hunger Force's marketing campaign did. 

April 15, 2009

• Monday night, Nightline recognizes the 60th anniversary of Harlequin publisher by having George Will, Paul Rudd and other read some steamy passages.  If Harlequin novels were available on audio book read by Paul Rudd it would be hard not to buy them. 

• Friday April 17 at 7:30 Pulitizer Prize winner and  two-time U.S Poet Laureate Ted Kooser will be in Springfield reading at Missouri State University in Plaster Student Union. The event is free and open to the public. Go here for more information.

April 14, 2009

• A new David Sedaris story is in the current issue of The New Yorker, which can be read for free at the magazine's website.

April 11, 2009

• Hot off his apperance in as special inaguratioin issue of Spider-man, Obama has taken a break from presidenting to star in a new Obama-inspired comic-book series which features characters such as “Barack the Barbarian,” “Sorceress Hillaria,” and “her demi-god trickster husband Bill".