The Inkwell Bookstore Blog

Hasta la vista, Irregulars!

2010-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T13:33:00.002-05:00

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-31T08:00:00.001-05:00

Today's indie bookstore reach-around is brought to you by Edward Nawotka.

David vs. Goliath -- part II! (How much do you wanna bet Goliath wins this time?)

You know those 'bestselling e-books' that Amazon keeps hyping? Over 50% of them are giveaways.

American Book Review asked writers to speculate -- in one sentence or less -- on the future of fiction. Here are the responses.

Director Bryan Singer has offered the first concrete quote as to what the hell the next X-Men film is going to be about, and it sounds like a yoai fanfic writer's dream: Professor Xavier and Magneto's tumultuous relationship as twenty-somethings.

Go, Look: Time's Top 10 Magazine Covers of '09

2009-12-30T12:35:00.003-05:00

Click here to begin.

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

Q: Are Americans are getting fatter because of their recent reading habits? A: Of course not, but the link needed a hook.

It's only slightly less depressing than those 'Local Bookstore to Close' articles: Local Bookstore Taking Painful Steps to Stay Afloat.

The NYTimes asked a handful of authors to explain how they decide which books to throw away and which to keep. Needless to say, the trash talk is as tepid as the praise is rhapsodic.

Local lawmaker hopes to make it tougher for pervs checking out kids checking out books. (Or: Quincy, MA is considering an ordinance that would ban Level 3 sex offenders from libraries.)

Ouch!

2009-12-29T10:20:00.004-05:00

"If Mr. Bezos wanted to do his part to avert layoffs of schoolteachers and firefighters and, yes, professors at state universities, he should start collecting the sales tax."
To read the rest of the NYTimes' assault on Amazon, click here.

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers,

2009-12-29T08:00:00.001-05:00

Voilà -- Voltaire! Philip Larkin explains the 'The Process of Poetry' in three simple steps.

Oy vey, the chutzpah! Daily Writing Tips has The 40 Yiddish Words You Should Know.

Plot to Punctuation echoes what I've been telling my probation officer for years: Villains are heroes too.

You tell me. Is CopyBlooger's 'The Eminem Guide to Becoming a Writing and Marketing Machine' the best titled tip of the day or what?

Three different approaches to dealing with writer's block, all from the same source. Swati Nitin Gupta's How to Avoid, How to Cure, and How to Take Advantage of Writer's Block. (Homegirl seems a li'l obsessed, no?)

These Are The Comics I Gave My Kinfolk For Christmas

2009-12-28T12:00:00.004-05:00

I'd originally intended to post this pre-X-mas, but on the off chance that one of my family members somehow happened upon this blog (yeah, right!), I figured I'd better wait. Fast forward four days, and now that all of the gifts have been distributed and the fill-in-the-name thank-you cards emailed en masse, I figured it was safe to share. So now, without further intro, a brief list of the comic books I gave to my comics-curious family.

To the 6th grade nephew who likes Bone, Monty Python & The Holy Grail, and monster movies:

The first two Dungeon books by Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar.
The Essential Godzilla by Doug Moench, Herb Trimpe, et al.

To the 9th grade niece who likes emo music, shopping at Hot Topic, and the Death Note anime:

The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá.
The first three xxxHOLIC books by Clamp.

To the 11th grade nephew who likes death metal, skinny jeans, and zombie movies:

The first three Detroit Metal City books by Kiminori Wakasugi.
The Walking Dead Omnibus volume 1 by Robert Kirkman, et al.

To the 40-something sister who loves sappy BBC costume melodramas and reads almost as many comics as me:

The first three Emma books by Kaoru Mori.
Future Lovers volume 1 and 2 by Saika Kunieda.

To the 40-something British brother-in-law who likes beer, wine, and looong conversations fueled by beer and wine:

Alec and The King Canute Crowd by Eddie Campbell.
The Disappearance Diary by Hideo Azuma.

What about you? I want to to know what books you got for your friends and family. More importantly, I want to know what books they gave you. Feel free to list, critique and offer public praise for gifts received in our comments section.

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-28T08:00:00.002-05:00

"A brilliantly ambitious article, this is, without a doubt, the editorial of the day...and possibly the decade."

Wanna-be writers of limited skill have reason to rejoice: Publishers are now begrudgingly accepting submissions from the merely "insanely great."

Librarians, like everyone else with even an infinitesimal investment in the written word, are nervous about what's gonna happen when Google scans the world.

Inspired by the publishing industry's recent ebook release announcements (and using the film industry's many missteps as a measuring stick), Booksquare has put together A Long, Detailed Look at Distribution Windows.

After initially announcing that they would be closing close to 200 Waldenbooks locations in the first few weeks of January, Borders now promises to save twenty of those stores. Question: Is this the big box bookstore's attempt at spinning themselves some positive PR? Cuz it still sounds grim.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-24T06:00:00.005-05:00

To all our faithful Irregulars and anonymous passersby:
If I were a much richer and more generous man, I'd give each and every one of you a copy of each and every one of these books. But since I'm not, the covers will have to suffice.

Happy Holiday! See you next week!

Last Minute Gift Tips for the Bookish: Papercraft

2009-12-23T11:57:00.003-05:00

Jules Verne Bust is available for download here.
Lovecraft's Cthulhu is available for download here.

Twilight: New Moon characters are available for download here.

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Toast Writers

2009-12-22T08:00:00.001-05:00

We're three short days away from Christmas. It's time to put down that NaNoWriMo novel you're secretly rewriting and get to work on your non-denominational, safe for alkies, seasonal toast. The fact is, your friends and family already 'jokingly' refer to you as a 'wannabe' writer. If you can't come up with a memorable pre-martini mantra, they're really gonna start talking sh*t about you. That's why, in an effort to save what's left of your writerly rep, we've put together a short list of toast writing tips. If you use these and your toast still sucks...well, maybe your family's right.

eHow's How to Write a Great Toast

Toastmasters Tips on Holiday Toasts

How To Do Things' How to write a toast

Emily Posts' Toasting Tips and Sample Toasts

Life123's Great Tips for Making The Best Holiday Toasts

Purple Trails Party Ideas' Toasts – Tips For Giving A Great Toast

Ezine @rticles' Holiday Toasts - Setting the Tone For the Holiday Break

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-21T09:27:00.004-05:00

Timely topic! While I giftwrap this copy of Nanny Returns: A Novel that I'm giving to my stepmother, please entertain yourselves with EW's Would you buy a book that makes you cringe as a gift if you know the recipient will love it?

A year-end list to make you slit your wrists! The LA Times momentarily forgets that they cut out the Books Section of their newspaper to make room for more film premiere photos, then asks, The decade in reading: How bad is it?

Don't go getting any ideas! Now that movies and music are available for free download online, arts & entertainment obsessed shoplifters have found a new favorite thing to steal: Books. (Don't worry, booksellers: With the rampant rise of e-books, the thieves will soon be downloading these, too.)

Gift Tips for the Bookish: T-shirts

2009-12-18T13:00:00.004-05:00

Jaime Hernandez 'Stussy' Tee: $28.00
Paul Pope 'Crepax' Tee: $20.00

Albert Camus Tee: $25.00
Shakespeare hates your emo poems Tee: $10.00

Movies: Ruining the book since 1920 Tee: $10.00
E.E. Cummings Quote Tee: $16.00

Kurt Vonnegut Tee: $16.00
William S. Burroughs Tee: $17.00

Charlotte Bronte Tee: $25.00
Yotsuba&! Tee: $15.00

Over-Priced Auction Results(or: some of the gifts you won't be getting this Christmas)

2009-12-18T12:00:00.003-05:00

Reuters puts a pillow to the face of your absinthe soaked sense of entitlement, reporting:
A first edition of Lewis Carroll's classic book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There -- dedicated to the real life Alice who inspired the story -- was sold at a U.S. auction for $115,000, auctioneers said on Thursday.
Click here to read the rest.

Get ready to see some eyeliner streak. Amoeblog dashes your inner goth's gimmie-gimmie fantasies, announcing:
At Christie's Auction House today in New York, an 1827 first edition copy of an Edgar Allan Poe poetry collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was sold for $662,500 -- the most ever for a 19th century book of poetry. The 40-page collection, and Poe’s very first publication, was inspired by the work of British poet Lord Byron.
Click here to read the rest.

Anne fans, put down your outstretched hands. The Canadian Press reports:
A first edition of Anne of Green Gables has sold for a record $37,500 at auction. The sale was made Friday at Sotheby's in New York and eclipses the previous record of $24,000 for the same title, which was set in June 2005. Sotheby's says only eight first edition copies of the Lucy Maud Montgomery book have appeared at auction over the last 35 years.
Click here to read the rest.

The AFP casts out the demons responsible for your unbridled lust over heathen texts, testifying:
A first edition of Charles Darwin's seminal On the Origin of Species found in a family's toilet in southern Britain sold for more than 100,000 pounds Tuesday, Christie's auction house said. The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, and kept in a bookcase in the guest toilet at the family's home in the Oxford area.
Click here to read the rest.

Happy holidays!

Book News, All Bad

2009-12-18T08:00:00.003-05:00

Marvel Comics has announced a new superhero series written and drawn solely by women. Its name? Girl Comics. Johanna Draper Carlson rightly rails against this.

The city of Laredo, TX is about to become the largest city in the U.S.A. to have no bookstores. Boot shops, gun shops, and liquor stores, on the other hand, remain as plentiful as unpaid border guards.

Author Philip Pullman has copped to his disappointment over the failure of Hollywood to complete the film trilogy of his series of fantasy novels, His Dark Materials. Um, has he seen the first one? Cuz it sucked.

PW reports, "Bob LiVolsi, founder of independent e-book retailer Books On Board, grabbed the spotlight at the MediaBistro eBook Summit, charging Amazon.com with 'predatory Pricing' and lamented the lack of antitrust enforcement in today's marketplace." Amazon, unsurprisingly, has yet to respond, choosing instead to wait the year or two it takes for Books On Board to go bust. The bastards.

One Last Bit of Adaptation News

2009-12-17T17:48:00.004-05:00

MovieWeb reports:
On the Official Avatar Myspace Site, director Bryan Singer (X-Men) dropped a major announcement about one of his next projects. It appears that the director is headed back to the franchise he pioneered...
"I just yesterday signed a deal to do an X-Men: First Class origins picture, which is kind of cool. I'm very excited."
X-Men: First Class is expected to inject a next-gen sensibility into the superhero series. - The studio has been leaning toward using the younger characters introduced in the previous films in future installments -- teenagers with powers taught at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning.
To read the rest, click here.

Adaptation News

2009-12-17T08:00:00.004-05:00

Reason #23433 I'm glad that Robert Downey Jr. never OD'd: The trailer to Iron Man 2.

The LATimes proclaims, "Greek mythology makes movie and TV comeback!" Here's hoping Homer has hired himself a good agent.

Wanna know exactly how J.D. Salinger feels about a Catcher in the Rye film? Letters of Note has a copy of an anti-adaptation screed handwritten by the reclusive author.

The Independent UK has put together a slide show featuring "the changing faces of Sherlock Holmes." Dilettante detectives can search for it themselves, everyone else can click here.

My favorite type of adaptation can't be seen on the big screen or the little screen, but in the small glass window on the oven. Click here to salivate over Through the Looking Glass cupcakes.

Natalie Portman has signed on to star in and produce a film based on the best-selling, sub-genre-creating book, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. My note to Ms. Portman: Before they rip your flesh off, please have them gratuitously tear away your bodice.

CHUD's take on Disney's plans to adapt all four Fallen books seems pretty spot-on: "Well why the fuck not? Swap out retarded but lofty sounding vampiric and lycanthropic mythology for epic and highly-simplified biblical babble and voila, you've got some coattails to ride!"

My Favorite Comic Book Covers of 2009

2009-12-16T12:00:00.011-05:00

Wolverine: First Class #19
Cover by Skottie Young
Strange Tales #1
Cover by Paul Pope

Punisher: Frank Castle Max #70
Cover by Dave Johnson
Punisher: Frank Castle Max #72
Cover by Dave Johnson

Detective Comics #854
Cover by J.H. Williams III
Detective Comics #855
Cover by J.H. Williams III

Amazing Spider Man #578
Cover by John Romita Jr.
Justice Society of America: Black Adam & Isis
Cover by Alex Ross

Amazing Spider Man #605
Cover by Mike Mayhew
Deadpool #11
Cover by Jason Pearson

Lockjaw and the Pet Avenvers #2
Cover by Niko Henrichon
Runaways: Teenage Wasteland Vol. 2
Cover by Jo Chen

Creepy #1
Cover by Eric Powell
Uptight #3
Cover by Jordan Crane

If'n Oof
Cover by Brian Chippendale
Dark Reign: Sinister Spider Man #2
Cover by Chris Bachalo

Lone Ranger and Tonto#2
Cover by John Cassaday
Looney Tunes #180
Cover by Scott Gross

See also: The Best Comics I Read in 2009

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-16T08:00:00.002-05:00

A shout-out to the sell-out who spoke out about selling her soul to Chicken Soup For The Soul. Or: Victoria Patterson talks turkey about 'Chick Soup-ing' her story, The Kindness of Strangers.

Congratulations to one of my all-time favorite cartoonists, Gilbert Hernandez, on being awarded a 2009 Rasmuson Fellowship in the category of literature. If you haven't read any of Beto's Palomar stories yet, get to it!

A "microanalytical examination" of an "illustrated miniature manuscript" of The Gospel of Mark found the kid-sized codex to be a fraud. That said, the faithful don't give a f*ck what scientists are able to disprove, so who cares?

First Publishers Weekly made a Best Books of 2009 list that didn't have any women, now they've come under fire for their unintentionally offensive 'Afro Picks' cover. Quick, before Hanukkah's over, can they pull off The Whoopi Goldberg Trifecta?

Do you obsess over J.D. Salinger's copyright and speak fluent legalese? Then head on over to the law offices of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz's website, where they've posted the transcripts to the entire Salinger vs. that guy who wrote the unlicensed sequel court case.

A gold and ivory retractable toothpick belonging to Charles Dickens is going up for auction in NYC next week. A word to my Secret Santa: Although I enjoyed A Muppets Christmas Carol as much as the next guy, please remember, I want a case of Sugar-Free Red Bull, not this bit of bacteria-laden memorabilia.

Gift Tips for the Bookish: Book Lights

2009-12-15T13:00:00.002-05:00

The Hydra Two Headed Book Light: $14.96
The LightWedge: $24.95-$34.95

Both the LightWedge and the Hydra come highly recommended from multiple members of our staff. Then again, multiple members of our staff also pushed me to read Stephenie Meyer, so caveat emptor.

Book Light In A Book Cover: $31.45

The Book Light In A Book Cover is just that: a pleather slip cover with a book light built into its spine. I can't vouch for it personally, but I sort of dig the robo-Bible aesthetic of the second picture. Mecha-Messiah would approve.

The Reading Light: Currently Unavailable
The Enlightenment: $125

I know, I know. What sort of a**hole teases his readership with an adorable little creation like The Reading Light, only to then say, 'Whoops! Currently unavailable'? I'm sorry. I've got no excuses for you. And as for The Enlightenment...um...lemme guess...too literal?

Listmania: Best of 2009s -- Updated!

2009-12-15T12:00:00.002-05:00

NPR's Year's Best Memoirs

NPR's Best Cookbooks of 2009

The L.A. Times' Favorite fiction of 2009

The NYTimes' 100 Notable Books of '09

ALA's 2009 Best Books for Young Adults

Entertainment Weekly's 10 Beautiful Books

Blackwell's 10 Favourite Books of the Decade

The NYTimes' Notable Crime Books of 2009

Booklist's Best Books for Young Adults: 2009

Lifehack's 10 Best Productivity Books of 2009

The National Book Awards' Best Books of 2009

NPR's Big and Beautiful: Best Gift Books of 2009

Examiner.com's 10 Best Book Club books of 2009

Drawn!'s Favourite Comics and Art Books of 2009

Publishers Weekly's 8 Different(!) Best of 2009 lists

The Globe & Mail's 11 Different(!!) Best of 2009 lists

The Millions' Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)

The NYTimes' Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009

Politics & Prose's Favorite Graphic Literature of the Year

Small Business Trends' Best Small Business Books of 2009

The Christian Science Monitor's Best Books of 2009: Fiction

The Christchurch City Libraries Blog's Best and Worst of 2009

Human Events' Top 10 Best-Selling Conservative Books in 2009

Paul Gravett's Angoulême 2010: The Best French Comics Of 2009

The Washington Post's Best Fiction, Nonfiction, and Top 10 of 2009

The Daily Cross Hatch's The Best Damned Comics of 2009 Chosen by the Artists

The Comics Reporter's The Best Superhero Comics of the 00s, and his readers' picks

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

2009-12-15T08:00:00.001-05:00

I'm listing it first, yet hoping you'll click on it last: How to turn off the internet while writing.

You see what I did there? I followed C.W.C.'s sage-like advice to Start with the Unexpected.

C.S. Lewis proffers a niggle of admonition regarding the utilization of voluminous words...hither.

Hilarious: The Rejectionist has assembled seven true-life writing tips gleaned from his/her viewing of Terminator: Salvation.

Yet another online article sure to appeal to aspiring authors looking for a secret shortcut to success: Publishing Perspectives' Inside the Secret World of Literary Scouts.

The Best Comics I Read in 2009

2009-12-14T12:00:00.005-05:00

Puh-leeze do not mistake this for one of those scientifically produced, computer algorithm-culled, 'Best Of 2009' lists that you see in comics curious magazines like Newsweek and Wizard. This is purely the product of one seriously scatterbrained blogger who has been obsessing over funnybooks for far too long, yet still feels woefully behind in his reading. (Hell, truth be told, most of these books came out pre-2009!) The only criteria for inclusion in this list was this: Out of every comic I curled up with, huddled over, and ate my favorite meals with in the past twelve months, which ones do I still think of most?

Cold Heat issues 1-8 by BJ and Frank Santoro
Click here to read the review that made me shell out $50+ on single issues when I know that there's inevitably gonna be a trade paperback stuffed with extras...for under $30.

Two-Fisted Tales vol. 1 by the EC Comics crew
Click here for the black & white excerpt that made me a convert.

The Disappearance Diary by Hideo Azuma
Click here to read my review.

Pluto by Naoki Urasawa
Click here to read the first five chapters.

Soldier X issues 1-8 by Macan & Kordey
Click here and here to read two reviews that will make you feel like you've missed out on one of the best superhero comics in years.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa
Click here to read the review that convinced me to stop being such a Carl Barks snob.

Gus by Christophe Blain
Click here to read my review.

Black Jack vol. 1-4 by Osamu Tezuka
Click here to read my review of volume 1.

Yotsuba&! vol. 1-6 by Kiyohiko Azuma
Click here to a review that's as infectiously light-hearted as the series itself.

Little Nothings 1 & 2 by Lewis Trondheim
Click here and here to read The Comics Reporter's reviews.

Uncanny X-Men issues 94-279 by Chris Claremont
Click here to read an issue by issue analysis, or here for some highlights.

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-14T08:00:00.004-05:00

According to The Wall Street Journal's review of Barnes & Noble's e-book, the Nook, old fashioned books have nothing to worry about.

The Chicago Tribune has compiled the perfect time-waster for literary trivia nerds: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Biggest Bestsellers.

Boston.com asked some "prominent Bostonians" to name their favorite comics from childhood. The results prove the old cliche -- New Englanders are a tasteful, educated lot.

The Guardian UK looks into a new trend in kids lit that's so controversial it's already been a 'Hot Topic' on FOX News and The View: Holiday books that intentionally take the Christ out of Christmas.

A new documentary about Fidel Castro, Fidel Anecdotes, contains a nice anecdote about the homophobic dictator's unexpected reaction to the copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula given to him by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read it, click here.

The New York Times tattles on US booksellers importing UK copies of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. While this is in direct violation of the hood's staunch, 'Stop Snitchin'' credo, it's kinda refreshing to see us portrayed as money-hungry hustlers instead of mild-mannered librarians. Holla!

Gift Tips for the Bookish: Bookcases

2009-12-11T13:00:00.001-05:00

No, not those bookcases.
Arty and unusual bookcases may work wonderfully as property porn in homemaking magazines, but as actual gifts for book lovers, they're pretty sh*tty. Most hold less than fifty books, and their fashion-not-function designs make any sort of practical categorization almost impossible. And the prices! That silly see-saw design retails for a whopping $1,899! Hell, I wouldn't push such a purchase in the best of economies, never mind our current one. So what sort of bookcases am I pimping?

Bricks and boards.
You can buy a cement block for $2 and a six foot long 2x7 for $3. That's an entire 6'x6' bookcase for less than $50! Now, I know what you're thinking. 'But my bookish friend is gonna think I'm cheap.' Not if you tell 'em it's a one-of-a-kind-artistic-recreation-of-the-classic-collegiate-model, they won't. If they try and call your bluff, simply kick a bottom brick and step out of the way. Ka-boom! That's one less present you'll have to buy next year.

Inkwell Irregulars, Assemble!

2009-12-11T12:00:00.004-05:00

Here's an easy post: A list of links to bookish blog posts made by our Inkwell Irregulars. Not only does it save me the time of sorting through an unwieldy assembly of AP articles featuring the words 'book,' 'publisher,' and 'bookstore,' it links you (our beloved blog reader) to them (our other beloved blog readers). Incestuous? Sort of. But this is a cult -- that sort of thing is par for the course.

Rachel Stark is a sick sadist who wants to see your kids cry. Why else would she be trying to figure out How Sad is Too Sad in Children's Books?

While the Northeast is busy b*tching about the first snow of the season, Brandy Lee takes the polar opposite approach, highlighting her favorite books with snow in the title.

While we're on the subject of seasonal lit, allow me to point you towards See Heather Write's mini-post highlighting holiday-themed excerpts from a few of her favorite authors.

Pol Culture's Robert Stanley Martin has taken on a Herculean task. He's translating Dante's Divine Comedy, complete with links to applicable illustrations and annotations. And you're doing what? Making Christmas cookies?

Speaking of over-achievers, I Love Rob Liefeld's Sandy has been compiling various 'Best Comics Of' lists from across the internet, aggregating them into lists of The top 50 comics of 2005, The top 50 comic of '06, The top 50 comics of '07, and The top 50 comics of '08 -- with The top 50 comics of '09 soon to follow.

Well, that's it for today. If'n you'd like to join our slowly expanding band of backwoods, book-loving belligerents, click here. All we ask is your life-long devotion, adoration, and a firstborn or two.

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-11T08:00:00.002-05:00

The winners of this year's Pimp My Bookcart awards have been announced. Although highly impractical, my favorite is The Lexington Public Library's third place winner.

An 87-year-old WWII veteran who stole one of Hitler's art books back in 1942 has come forward to return the book. Cuz heaven forbid a genocidal madman's possessions go missing.

In an effort to assist the nation's countless crumbling brick and mortar bookstores, HarperCollins has announced that they will join Hatchette and Simon & Schuster in delaying the e-book release of certain titles.

On the flip side, US magazine and newspaper publishers Conde Nast, Time, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp. just announced that they would soon be launching a digital newsstand for "the electronic devices of the future."

The Guardian UK is out to hurt some feelings, asking their readers to list their picks for The Worst Books of the Decade. Then, as if to put a preemptive halt to the haters of hate's hate, they went and asked their readers to share their favorites.

Alfonso Frazetta, the no-acclaim son of legendary cartoonist and illustrator Frank Frazetta, was arrested on Thursday after driving a backhoe into an Allentown, PA museum owned by his father. The 52-year-old disappointment was attempting to steal $20 million worth of his pop's paintings.

Cool Covers from Recent Releases

2009-12-10T12:00:00.004-05:00

Bent Objects: The Secret Life of Everyday Things by Terry Border
Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life by Todd Oldham

The Mighty Book of Boosh by Julian Barratt & Noel Fielding
I Love Macarons by Hisako Ogita

You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas by Augusten Burroughs
How to Be Inappropriate by Daniel Nester

Adaptation News

2009-12-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

Daily Motion has an 'exclusive peek' at Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. Click here to view.

Tom Clancy fans curious to know which book the next Jack Ryan film will be based on may be a bit disappointed. I'll let CHUD deliver the bad news.

Chipper movie based on chipper book uses chipper imagery for chipper inspiration. Or: The Road has end-of-the-world images inspired by Katrina aftermath.

A clip from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo film, along with a chat with its director, is available here. Then again, you could just watch the whole film illegally here.

Jonathan Lethem's insane sci-fi/noir Gun With Occasional Music has been optioned by the producers of the absolutely nuts Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. This could be a very kooky combination.

We Must Do This!

2009-12-09T13:00:00.000-05:00

Photo stolen with pride from We Sing Sin (who borrowed it whole from fuckyeahreading!).

Gift Tips for the (Comic)Bookish:Criterion Prints

2009-12-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

Over the last few years, the universe's premier dvd company, Criterion, has been commissioning some of my favorite comic book artists to do covers for their releases. Last December, as if answering a silent prayer by an alternate reality's non-atheistic me, Criterion began selling this artwork as limited edition, giclée prints. If your (comic)bookish friend or family member has ever expressed their adoration for any of these artists, buying them one of these prints is guaranteed to make them your b*tch.
(And really, isn't making b*tches what the holidays are all about?)

Cover to Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Art by Bill "Stray Toasters" Seinkiewicz.

Covers to The Madmen and Monsters Collection. Art by Darwyn "DC: The New Frontier" Cooke.

Cover to Divorce Italian Style. Art by Jaime "Love and Rockets" Hernandez.

Cool Comics Links

2009-12-09T08:00:00.003-05:00

Considering a career in manga translating? Matt Thorn has some sensible advice.

Cuz everyone loves a list (or two), here's Paste Magazine's Best Comics of the Decade (and The Onion's).

Gay chicks are just as shallow as straight guys. Need proof? Check out AutoStraddle's looong post nominating The Sexiest X-Man.

The Cool Kids have penned a paean to Doctor Strange. Even better, they've put up a detailed list of the best Strange-centric story lines.

My favorite comics-related article of the past couple weeks comes courtesy of CBR: Timothy Callahan uses Greek philosophy to explain why a few new characters stick, while most just slip away.

Chris Sims saved a year's worth of Previews catalogs and sacrificed countless hours that he could've spent finding a way to give rich, Beverly Hills residents those sexy cheekbones all the starving Croatian kids have, all to bring you The Worst and Strangest Collectible Statues of 2009. Bless you, Chris.

Gift Tip for the Bookish Writerish

2009-12-08T14:00:00.001-05:00

The best part about this tasteful, tactful t-shirt? It's only $6...here.

Go, Look:A New David Foster Wallace Short Story

2009-12-08T12:00:00.001-05:00

At: The New Yorker. Via: The Comics Reporter.

Writers on Writing

2009-12-08T11:00:00.001-05:00

"Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all." Franklin P. Adams

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

2009-12-08T08:00:00.004-05:00

How many of The 14 Biggest Mistakes Even Best-Selling Writers Make have you made? And you're still unpublished? Weird.

The title sounds simplistic, but the advice is good: The Wall Street Journal asks successful authors How to Write a Great Novel.

Okay, so I probably should've shared this with you sooner: Men With Pens' 5 Things You Absolutely Need to Know Before You Write a Novel.

If you read The Business of Writing's 8 Tips for Writing Compelling Imagery and still can't come up with a quick and concise way to describe your lead vampire's crypt/crash-pad, stick your over-priced fountain pen in your ear. Now push.

Let's finish this up with the best bit of writing-related advice I came across this week. Guide to Literary Agents has been posting query letters that "succeeded in getting writers signed with agents," as well as thoughts from the agents as to why the letters worked. Steal liberally.

Big Box Bookstores Are Like The Hydra...

2009-12-07T13:00:00.004-05:00

...Cut off one chain retailer, and another will instantly pop up to take its place.

The Times Online reports:
Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer and scourge of bookshops everywhere, is planning a surprise invasion of the British high street.

Property landlords said that the American company, which has a market value of $59.1 billion (£35.6 billion), had launched a secret search for bricks-and-mortar stores to support its rapidly growing website. It is understood to be scouring the country for high-profile sites just as the Borders book chain is shutting up shop.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Gift Tips for the Bookish: Jane Austen Junk

2009-12-07T12:00:00.007-05:00

Jane Austen note cards
Available for $12 here.
Emma necklace
Available for $44 here.

Pride and Prejudice board game
Available for $29 here.

Jane Austen hoodie
Available for $30 here.
I Love Mr. Darcy t-shirt
Available for $22 here.

Mr. Darcy's Proposal mug
Available for $14 here.

Mr. Darcy paper doll
Available for $10 here.
Jane Austen action figure
Available for $9.95 here.

Jane Austen-themed crossword puzzles
Available for FREE here.

Editor's note: For the record, none of the sites linked to here -- or anywhere else on our site -- provide us with any sort of payment, credit, or compensation. When we post something like this, it's because we think this sh*t's cool. When we accompany these posts with purchasing links, we do so only so that similarly interested parties can easily obtain these products without spending hours on Google or (gasp!) resorting to Amazon. Trust me, when it comes time to whore myself out, it'll be on a street corner, and I'll be in drag.

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-07T08:00:00.003-05:00

It's this week's winner of The Last Book I'll Ever Read award: An American made, Gossip Girl 'manga.'

The NYTimes investigates the curative powers of the brown bag book cover, linking aesthetics with acceptance in When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books.

The Guardian UK puts sell-out sonnetists in the hot-seat, asking some of today's most successful poets, What's with all of the poetry-prostituting in crap-culture advertising?

A top Australian design firm was recently hired by the State Library of New South Wales to create an ad campaign that would make the 100-year-old Mitchell Library "sexy." They came up with a font. As to whether it's an EPIC FAIL or visual Viagra, you decide.

CNN exhumes a pile of bones and bodices, dares to ask, What Really Killed Jane Austen? (As an aside: Could classics crossed with crime fic be the next big genre mash-up? Is CSI: Meryton the next Pride & Prejudice & Zombies? If so, I call copyright.)

A first edition of Anne of Green Gables is slated for sale at a Sotheby's auction this Friday. While pundits predict it could fetch up to $25,000, the fact that an original copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane and Other Poems sold for $662,500 last Friday makes me think that you and I are waaay too poor to bother bidding.

Bookish Tweets by Our Bookish Peeps

2009-12-04T08:00:00.006-05:00

(Or: Bleary-eyed blogger lists lit links from The Inkwell's Twitter feed, tries to pass it off as Book News.)

@AbeBooks: Discover what book was in Tiger's car when he crashed http://ow.ly/Igqc

@LOGICOMIX: The results of Slate's "write like Sarah Palin" contest are in. http://bit.ly/5g6mJu

@BloomsburyPress: Whew. Plenty of women in NYTBR top 10 of 09 list. http://bit.ly/5WwsH6

@sarahw: CJ Box on the ten crime novelists who are the best tour guides for their respective cities http://is.gd/5a3vW

@VillageBksBham: Have a few $1,000 around the house that you'd like to spend on Cormac McCarthy's typewriter? http://bit.ly/7gItF4

@carleenbrice: Author Erica Kennedy on bitches, books, female ambition, Sasha Fierce, & what's wrong w/publishing. http://ow.ly/IguF

Note: All of the super cute, lit-themed, Twitter avatars used above (and many more!) are available free of charge on Adam 'The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats' Koford's Flickr page.

Gift Tips for the Bookish: The Pillow Light

2009-12-03T12:00:00.002-05:00

This little gem's got it all. One side lights up like a miniature sun, the other side has all the comforts of Nerf. You can warm your hands while reading, then singe your sheets while sleeping. And look at that strange, four-boob design. Snuggling up with this modern marvel will take you back to that hot, drunken threesome you had in college. ~~Mammaries!~~ Memories! But don't just take my word for it. Here's the manufacturer's misspelled pitch: Reading in bed gets mor comfy now- Pillow Light prevents stiff necks and keeps your hands free to turn the pages. What "mor" do you need to hear?!

If you can figure out the Kidsmodern website, you can order The Pillow Light here.

Adaptation News (sorta like Book News, only we effed with the endings)

2009-12-03T08:00:00.008-05:00

Filming of that gol durned Hobbit movie has been postponed again. This time, 'til summer of 2010.

I'm torn. While the three new clips from Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes look horrible, the film does star Robert Downey Jr. What to do, what to do...

Over at The Guardian UK, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers describe the day they went to Maurice Sendak's house to ask him about filming Where the Wild Things Are.

Summit Films plans to milk its lone cash cow for as long as they can, splitting the fourth Twilight book, Breaking Dawn, up into two movies. Click here to read what that'll entail.

Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and Spike Lee (Do The Right Thing) are teaming up to adapt the French comic book, Miss: Better Living Through Crime. The book is about two 1920s criminals, Nola and Slim, who become killers for hire.

The Wire's Idris Elba has joined the cast of Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Marvel Comics' Thor. Already on board are Ray Stevenson (Punisher: War Zone), Tadanobu Asano (Taste of Tea), and Natalie Portman (far too many of my waking sex dreams).

Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment Explained...Using Comics

2009-12-02T12:00:00.003-05:00

Book News, In Brief

2009-12-02T08:00:00.005-05:00

Author/trench coat model Neil Gaiman thinks that the 'death of audiobooks' is just a case of folks talking out their asses.

Kinda-sorta sister-lists to our own Listmania: Best of 2009s: Ozaku's and The Precious Curmudgeon's lists of Manga Gift Guide Lists.

Author/masturbation magician Grant Morrison has a feature length documentary about himself coming out in 2010. Wired has two clips from it here.

Wired again. This time they're skewering a modern-day literary classic with The Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight. Now with video!

"Borders has gone belly-up, Amazon thrives, and doom-mongers are proclaiming the death of literature on the high street. But this could be the opening of a fine new chapter…" Or so The Guardian UK claims.

Jonathan Littell has won the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award for his 900-page novel, The Kindly Ones. The passage that cinched the win compared vaginas to various Greek mythological creatures including the snake-haired Gorgon and "a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks." Sexy!

Writers on Writing

2009-12-01T13:00:00.001-05:00

"A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose."
Samuel McChord Crothers

Gift Tips for the Bookish:Toys Action Figures Collectible Figurines

2009-12-01T12:00:00.008-05:00

December means holidays! Holidays mean gifts! Gifts mean otherwise avoidable stress-related illnesses, as good gift ideas inevitably dry up the closer you get to your pagan festival of choice. Ah, but fear not! Cuz from now until the end of the month, we'll be highlighting some prime prose-related presents for the bookish folks on your shopping list. As for the non-bookish folks...well, they get spam-laden e-cards.

Oscar Wilde action figure.
Available for $8.95 here.
Jane Austen action figure.
Available for $9.95 here.

Yotsuba&! pose-able figures.
Yotsuba is available for $16 here.
Cardbo/Danbo is available for considerably more here.

Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba's The Umbrella Academy.
Available for $33.99 here.

Editor's note: For the record, none of the sites linked to here -- or anywhere else on our site -- provide us with any sort of payment, credit, or compensation. When we post something like this, it's because we think this sh*t's cool. When we accompany these posts with purchasing links, we do so only so that similarly interested parties can easily obtain these products without spending hours on Google or (gasp!) resorting to Amazon. Trust me, when it comes time to whore myself out, it'll be on a street corner, and I'll be in drag.

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

2009-12-01T08:00:00.004-05:00

The title says it best: Why Writing Rubbish is Productive

Fiction Notes details the two types of feedback, as well as the five reactions to it.

Writing blogs are currently obsessed with correct comma usage. Don't believe me? Click here, here, and here.

Fiction Matters has 3 Questions To Better Understand Your Novel (that will also help you write a better query letter).

Bad Language About Writing's Open with a Punch, Close with a Kick would be more effective if most writers weren't potbellied pacifists.

Nothing cripples creativity like self-doubt. A quick read through Quips & Tips' 4 Signs You Need to Reevaluate Your Writing or Publication Goals and you'll be positively paralyzed. Hello, handicapped parking!

The Minimalist Cover Art of Evan Gaffney

2009-11-30T13:00:00.001-05:00

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead

Spent by Geoffrey Miller
Fangland by John Marks

Twelve Fingers: Biography of an Anarchist by Jô Soares
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Gaffney's minimalist approach is apparent on his website, too. It's just one page -- no pictures, no links.

Wendell's 30 Book Review:Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino

2009-11-30T12:00:00.002-05:00

Calvino’s Italian Folktales is now my favorite folktale collection. It is a huge paperback with hundreds of stories in it, which average about two pages each. Calvino collected Italian folktales, sometimes building on previous folktale collectors’ work, and made slight changes - which he makes note of, unlike the Grimms - for continuity or even aesthetics. I would not have noticed the changes myself, as the tales still feel “authentic” to the spirit of the story, while having an elegant simplicity to the language, even in translation! The wonder I find in the stories shares space with a matter-of-fact attitude towards the roughness of life-giving it no more or less attention than it should have - as well as just the right amount of the bizarre to please my tastes. Thanks to these folktales, my imagination is sparked, and my interest in using the phrase “seek my fortune” in daily life is growing. Now to see whether this fortune includes a castle!

This will be Wendell 'Scutopus' Edwards' last book review, as he is heading off to NYC to find fame and fortune. Good luck, Wendell. You -- and your reviews -- will be missed.

Listmania: Best of 2009s

2009-11-30T08:00:00.013-05:00

'Tis the last day of the next to the last month of the year. While this monumental day in your monthly calendar's countdown to extinction inevitably brings with it a sh*toad of personal, financial and familial regrets, it also ushers in a sh*tload of 'Best Of' book lists. For the sake of our sanity, let's focus on those.

NPR's Best Cookbooks of 2009

The L.A. Times' Favorite fiction of 2009

The NYTimes' 100 Notable Books of '09

ALA's 2009 Best Books for Young Adults

Entertainment Weekly's 10 Beautiful Books

Blackwell's 10 Favourite Books of the Decade

The NYTimes' Notable Crime Books of 2009

Booklist's Best Books for Young Adults: 2009

Lifehack's 10 Best Productivity Books of 2009

The National Book Awards' Best Books of 2009

NPR's Big and Beautiful: Best Gift Books of 2009

Examiner.com's 10 Best Book Club books of 2009

Drawn!'s Favourite Comics and Art Books of 2009

Publishers Weekly's 8 Different(!) Best of 2009 lists

The Globe & Mail's 11 Different(!!) Best of 2009 lists

The Millions' Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)

The NYTimes' Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2009

Politics & Prose's Favorite Graphic Literature of the Year

Small Business Trends' Best Small Business Books of 2009

The Christian Science Monitor's Best Books of 2009: Fiction

The Christchurch City Libraries Blog's Best and Worst of 2009

Human Events' Top 10 Best-Selling Conservative Books in 2009

Paul Gravett's Angoulême 2010: The Best French Comics Of 2009

The Washington Post's Best Fiction, Nonfiction, and Top 10 of 2009

The Comics Reporter's The Best Superhero Comics of the 00s, and his readers' picks

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T00:01:00.012-05:00

(And a solemn 'Uh...sorry?' to our Wampanoag brothers and sisters.)

See you Monday!

This Week's Best Comics Links(a.k.a. your last bit of joy before fighting with your effed-up family)

2009-11-25T13:30:00.005-05:00

The Yaoi Review hands the reigns over to its straight-girls-who-love-gay-guys readers, asking them to suggest the best and worst books for all-ages, y-curious readers.

The 1975 manga version of Jaws is nuts. For two sick samples, click here and here. Then up the ante and click here to check out Junji Ito's absolutely insane when-fish-attack manga, Gyo.

The Comics Reporter recently ran a looong list of his picks for The Best Superhero Comics of the 00s. Then, cuz everyone's got an opinion, he went and ran a second list of his readers' picks.

You'd better make this link last, cuz it's the last one til Monday: David Welsh folds his hands, bows his head, and shares the manga-related developments for which he's thankful. Can he get an amen?

Cuz he's an author and a chef and tomorrow's Thanksgiving...

2009-11-25T12:00:00.002-05:00

Anthony Bourdain on Authors@Google

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-25T08:00:00.001-05:00

Daryl Cagle must be as unhealthily obsessed with Sarah Palin as I am. Why else would he have compiled 30 Editorial Cartoons Lampooning Palin's Book Tour?

Eff Thanksgiving. We're celebrating our enemy's apparent demise: Borders' UK website has stopped taking customer orders, and their staff has been told that they are no longer allowed to place customer orders. For more details (and dirt), click here.

A copy of Through the Looking Glass once owned by the 'Alice' who inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland will be sold at an auction next month. If you've got enough free time to read these links, you're not working a in field that pays you enough to bid.

Samuel Webster is right when he says that "Young Adult Fiction is one of the few genres with a psychologically pervasive and accepted sociological function," which is why I love that his article, The Ideology and Irony of Adolescent Fiction, takes the fawned-over field to task.

American Media Inc., critically acclaimed publisher of The National Enquirer and Star, has struck a deal with Playboy Enterprises to manage major parts of its flailing flagship title. What does this mean for you and I and the rest of those enlightened individuals who enjoy Playboy's thought-provoking interviews and airbrushed anuses? The photos will be sleazier, the prose will plummet.

Go, Look: Wally Wood Warps LOTR

2009-11-24T11:40:00.003-05:00

Go, look!

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

2009-11-24T08:00:00.008-05:00

Ray Bradbury offers a bit of advice to flailing writers: Flail more.

Masturbate to this: Rants & Ramblings' How Book Royalties Work.

I'm not sure how scientific this list is, but it feels fairly feasible. Wordplay's Top 7 Reasons Readers Stop Reading. (Via.)

Doyce Testerman offers a helping hand to NaNoWriMo writers looking to pad out their anorexic opuses: The Rule of Three! (Via.)

Thanks to technology, learning to write no longer requires reading! A free recording of the 'teleclass' Breaking Into Food Writing is available here. (Via.)

A Distant Soil creator Collen Doran has compiled the links to all of her hard-won lessons about self-publishing and webcomics onto one easy-to-navigate table of contents. If you're considering a life in either, you'll wanna bookmark these.

Recommended Viewing: Going West

2009-11-23T15:51:00.002-05:00

Trashing a book to tell a story. It doesn't sound like it would work, but the results speak for themselves.
(Via: Cartoon Brew)

Comic Book Review:Cable & Deadpool by Fabian Nicieza, et al.

2009-11-23T12:00:00.007-05:00

Writer Fabian Nicieza's Cable & Deadpool is a 50 issue 'buddy-movie' starring the Marvel Universe's equivalents of Jesus Christ and Bugs Bunny. It promised loose laughs and even looser sci-fi concepts, yet somehow managed to morph into an affecting ode to fractured friendships and surrogate families.

The plot -- as it was initially pitched -- was simple. Well, sorta. Fast-talking killer-for-hire Deadpool (a.k.a. 'the merc with the mouth') is paired up with time-traveling, soldier from the future, Cable (a.k.a. the son of the X-Men's Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey). Deadpool wants money. Cable wants to provide the preventative measures required to stop Earth from becoming a war-torn wasteland. You know, your basic run-of-the-mill comedy of opposites with minor Messianic undertones.

Story lines run the gamut, going from blue-skinned cults to hard boiled detective stories to the at-least-it's-dealt-with-quickly Civil War crossover, all while supporting an over-arching plot line partially lifted from the end of Alan Moore's/beginning of Neil Gaiman's run on Miracleman: Cable's creation of island utopia via his many mutant abilities. This is the 'real' story here, the one that you'll find blurbed on the back of the trade paperbacks and in the lead paragraph of the title's Wikipedia entry. And for good reason -- it's good! Nicieza intelligently explores the pros and cons of living under the gentle fist of an all-powerful peacekeeper, all the while using Deadpool's batsh*t crazy blood-lust (and Bea Arthur-inspired loin-lust) as the fail-safe for keeping things unpretentious and unpredictable.

Up to issue 42, I was really enjoying the series. The action was exciting, the dialogue irreverent, and the art (almost always) enjoyable. But as a perpetual pruner of my comics collection, I had no intention of holding onto these books when I was done. 'Out with the old, in with expensive, hardcover, classic comics re-prints,' as they say. It's not that there was anything particularly wrong with the series, it's just that, up til that point, there was nothing especially right. Wait, let me re-phrase that. There was a lot 'right.' The jokes alone were worth the price of admission. It's just that nothing had hit me in such a way that I thought, 'You know, I could come back to these books year after year and always find myself emotionally engaged in more ways than giggles.' As corny as it sounds, I want the art I keep around me to be the art that adds to me, that betters me, that reminds me of ideas, ideals and philosophies that I'm prone to lose sight of during my day-to-day living. And up to issue 42, Cable & Deadpool had yet to offer anything in the way of this awkwardly worded request.

Or so I thought.

Here's where I've gotta offer up one of those annoying, all-caps SPOILER ALERT!s. I mean, if you scan the titles of the trade paperbacks, this spoilerific plot point is actually a title-changing event, but some folks are sensitive to this sort of thing. You want a hint? The book goes from being called Cable & Deadpool to Deadpool vs. The Marvel Universe. Did you see what just happened there? SPOILER ALERT! (again!) Cable died. Yes, on the next-to-the-last page of issue 42, Cable sacrifices himself while his Nantucket-like nirvana explodes in a fiery, Photoshop-assisted explosion. From that point on, for the last eight issues of the series, Deadpool is bounced from one guest star to another in a style reminiscent of Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. In most corporate comics, this is usually the 'jump the shark' moment, the first glimpse of the shadow of death for any teetering title. Yet somehow (no, not "somehow" -- because of the authorial ingenuity of Fabian Niciez!) it's this extended dying breath of the soon-to-be-canceled comic where things really come together. Having lost the only character in the Marvel Universe who truly believes in him, Deadpool begins to begrudgingly surround himself with a new cast of surrogate sidekicks. They're a motley band of has-beens (Sandi, Outlaw, Agent X) and never-weres (the brilliantly conceived Bob, Agent of Hydra) who, as the last few issues unfold, become a sort of 'workplace family' for our fast-talking antihero. It's this last bit of character building that adds an unexpected gravitas to the series as whole. All of the wacky adventures, pseudo-science, and Christ-like posturing was fun while it lasted, but it's Cable and Deadpool's platonic partnership that now resonates most with the reader. After all, it's only because of the unconditional love and devotion that Cable had shown the oft-undeserving Deadpool that Deadpool is now able to open himself up similarly to others. (Well, he might've been open to a little sumthin'-sumthin' with the aforementioned Bea Arthur, but that was about it.) This is an obvious insight, I know, but it's also one that is nice to have reiterated from time to time. It's especially nice when it's done using a clinically insane comic book character who breaks the fourth wall while wearing boxer shorts emblazoned with his own iconic emblem.

At least, it was for me. And will be again. Cuz I'm hanging on to these.

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-23T08:00:00.005-05:00

Nice Girls Do author Sarah Duncan says 'Enough with the Bad Sex Awards -- where's the squishy, squashy, interlocking Good Sex Trophies?!'

Local guy makes good. Providence poet Keith Waldrop won a National Book Award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. To hear the bearded bard read some of his work, click here.

What happens when your thinly-veiled memoir makes headlines for being a, well, thinly veiled memoir? The Australian explores the inevitable emotional outfall.

A Latino-centric poetry series at East Harlem's El Museo del Barrio is causing a bit of controversy over its title: Spic Up/Speak Out. The naysayers label it "a complete lack of consciousness," while the yea-sayers say, "You do not want to fall into this dogma where all Puerto Rican or Latino writers have to be serious. [...] This can be a moment of reflection."

Every bookseller I've talked to has a secret bookstore backup plan. You know, for when Amazon puts the shop you're currently working at out of business, this is the place you plan to apply to next. For me, it's always been a 50/50 toss-up between Los Feliz' Skylight Books and Boston's Comicopia. But this article in The Morning Call has me contemplating a third option, this one a PA bookstore that serves as a fully-functional front for a South Bethlehem speakeasy!

Palin Quits...Again.

2009-11-20T18:32:00.002-05:00

From nationalbroadcasters' YouTube entry:
"An angry crowd shouts at Sarah Palin...on November 19, 2009 after Palin quits and refuses to sign books for around 300 families that spent about 3+ hours getting wristband and another 3+ hours waiting in line to get the Palin book signed."

Go, Look: Cover Art Copycats

2009-11-20T13:00:00.007-05:00

Or: 'Reusable Cover Art in Historical Novels -- A Gallery'
(Via.)

Inkwell Irregulars, Assemble!

2009-11-20T12:00:00.002-05:00

Here's an easy post: A list of links to bookish blog posts made by our Inkwell Irregulars. Not only does it save me the time of sorting through an unwieldy assembly of AP articles featuring the words 'book,' 'publisher,' and 'bookstore,' it links you (our beloved blog reader) to them (our other beloved blog readers). Incestuous? Sort of. But this is a cult -- that sort of thing is par for the course.

This is one of those pitch-perfect posts that's just one well-connected Tweet away from becoming an internet sensation: Estoreal's Without Boulders -- Woody Allen's long-lost Flintstones script.

Daij is a poet whose blog, Soultight, either inspired the poem posted here, or visa-versa. Whichever, I know I'm going to be reciting this vitriolic verse like a mantra throughout Thanksgiving dinner.

Frank Black from The Friday Night Boys put up a nice birthday tribute to Spider-Man co-creator and Ayn Rand devotee, Steve Ditko. The bio is brief, the pictures are perfect, and now I feel like a class-A heel for having missed the maestro's birthday myself.

For those of you struggling with a NaNoWriMo novel, Rachel Stark's What Can a Job Interview Teach You About Writing? will no doubt prove useful. Hell, even if you're not writing a book and are just suffering through an extended spell of unemployment, the tips might still be worth checking out.

I'm currently making my way through all 196 issues of Chris Claremont's original run on The Uncanny X-men, but that's nothing compared to the time-consuming task that Robert has set out for himself over at The Matt Murdock Chronicles: He's reading and reviewing the entire Daredevil comic book series.

Elizabeth Avedon's photography and book design both possess the same bold and iconic visual appeal. To think that one person can achieve such similarly spectacular effects with two wholly different mediums is hella cool...and slightly nauseating. Join me in my jealousy. Click here to check out a small sampling of her work.

Well, that's it for today. If'n you'd like to join our slowly expanding band of backwoods, book-loving belligerents, click here. All we ask is your life-long devotion, adoration, and a firstborn or two.

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-20T08:00:00.005-05:00

The Bad Sex Award shortlist pits Philip Roth's The Humbling against Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Monroe. While Roth silently stews, Cave's publishers have put out the following press release: "Frankly we would have been offended if he wasn't shortlisted." Rad.

Q: Who doesn't like boobs & boners? A: Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard. OregonLive.com reports, "The owners of Cindy's Bookstore, torn down in 2008 after repeated inspections, have sued City Commissioner Randy Leonard, the city, PGE and others for nearly $1 million, arguing Leonard selectively enforced ordinances against businesses he doesn't like."

Raul Vazquez, Walmart.com's chief executive officer, told Bloomsbury.com that the big W's deep discounting on new release hardcovers in no way constitutes "illegal predatory" practices. Oh, okay. If you say so, Raul. Wait -- do you pinky-swear? You do? Alrighty then. Um, while we're carrying on an imaginary conversation, do you think I can grab a job application? CUZ YR GONNA PUT MY BKSTR OUT OF BIZNIZ!!!

A fear of H1N1 (and a very good chance of getting punched in the face by some of the publishing people I've pissed off here) caused me to miss last weekend's Boston Book Fair. If any of our readers were able to attend, and they happened to snap a photo of the rare, 1853 book, Dance of Death, please post a link in the comments section. For those of you unfamiliar with this timeless children's classic, Dance of Death illustrates different ways to die, is bound in genuine human skin, and includes an inlay of a skull carved from human bone and teeth.

Scutopedia Entry #00001

2009-11-19T20:06:00.004-05:00

The Inkwell's very own Wendell 'Scutopus' Edwards coined a new word today. I'll let him tell it:
"Those customers who come in talking about how much they love bookstores to their friends, wander about looking at everything, and then leave without buying anything are just one species of...meanderthal! One person even came in today saying they wanted to own this very store, yet left with nothing but that which they entered. Walk the walk, folks!"

No, that's kind of sad.

2009-11-19T14:00:00.002-05:00

Catherine Hardwicke warns TIME of Twilight's long-lasting effects:

"For so many little girls, Edward will always be their first love. They are going to be 80-year-old women in the future that will remember Rob, love Edward Cullen, and remember Twilight. That's kind of awesome."
Via: Movie City News

Cool Covers from Recent Comics Releases

2009-11-19T12:00:00.003-05:00

X-Men Origins: Iceman #1
Cover by Phil Noto
DC Holiday Special 2009
Cover by Dustin Nguyen

Nomad: Girl Without A World #3
Cover by Rafael Albuquerque
Batgirl #4
Cover by Phil Noto

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 8 #3
Cover by Adam Hughes
Looney Tunes #180
Cover by Scott Gross

Adaptation News(where 'faithful' is the only f-word you're not allowed to say)

2009-11-19T08:00:00.001-05:00

Reverse adaptation! BBC Books has commissioned Michael Moorcock to write a Doctor Who novel. Predictably, the nerds are nervous.

Even a bitter, old a-hole like me finds a bit of holiday spirit in animatronic department store dioramas. Click here for a peek at Bergdorf's Fantastic Mr. Fox display.

Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson says that he had to shoot extra footage for the film after test audiences complained that the death scene wasn't violent enough.

McG's inevitably atrocious adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea would've been a unending source of cynical blog posts. Alas, Disney has sunk the project.

In an obvious bid for Oscars and accolades, Dreamgirls dream-girl Jennifer Hudson has signed on to star in Winnie, a biopic based on Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob's Winnie Mandela: A Life. Wasn't my undying lust enough for you, Jen?

Yee-Haw! It's the Negative Review Round-Up!

2009-11-18T12:00:00.003-05:00

Not only are negative reviews easier and more fun to write than positive reviews, they're easier and more fun to read, too. So pick up your torch and join me and the mob as we heap hate upon a few recent releases in this week's installment of The Negative Review Round-Up.
(Note: As most of us are lying, whorish, booksellers ready to sell our souls to make a softcover sale, I've also included small print links to some positive reviews. Feel free to crib liberally from these when dealing with the money-wielding masses.)

Cable #20 by Duane Swierczynski
Review by Tucker Stone:
"The best part of the comic is that the story's title is Checkmate, which means that Swierczynski thinks chess analogies can be approximated by having two steroid fantasy men beat the shit out of each other with space weapons, endlessly."
To read the whole review, click here.
(Then again, Duane Swierczynski loved it!)

And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer
Review by Paul Constant:
"Let's make one thing perfectly clear: And Another Thing..., Eoin Colfer's authorized sequel to the late Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, is a horrible, pointless book. The first, and perhaps most egregious, crime Colfer commits is simply not being funny. His book is unimaginative and sloppily devoted to Adams's previous work. [...] Colfer doesn't even try to mimic Adams's sublime Wodehouse-writes-Monty Python-in-space mashup style. Instead, he vomits up some halfhearted fan fiction and expects to coast on his predecessor's reputation."
To read the whole review, click here.
(Then again, Geek-speak loved it!)

What The Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell
Review by Steven Pinker:
"An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of 'homology,' 'sagittal plane' and 'power law' and quotes an expert speaking about an 'igon value' (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong."
To read the whole review, click here.
(Then again, The Telegraph UK "is entertained by" it!)

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-18T08:00:00.009-05:00

Having grown bored with simply warping the romantic fantasy worlds of their reality-deprived readership, Harlequin has teamed up with print-on-demand publisher Author Solutions to eff with their readers' writing fantasies as well.

Britain's bestselling anonymous author/high-class whore has gained the respect of ~~millions~~ hundreds after revealing herself to be a -- wait for it -- neurotoxicology scientist. The lesson for sexually abused young ladies considering a career in blowjobs and blogging? Get that PhD, girl!

The residents of Poligny, France banded together to buy the lease to their local, failing, indie bookstore, all in an effort to keep it up and running. Note to our Right-wing readers still stuck in the halcyon days of domestic terrorism: 'Freedom fries' is out. We're now calling them 'F*ck yeah fries' or 'Charity chips.'

Omaha.com and The Philadelphia Enquirer held hands, closed their eyes, and took a giant leap in logic, introducing the insane hypothesis that non-fiction is "easier to read" than fiction because (1.) "memoirs are easier for book groups to discuss" and (2.) would-be writers prefer penning memoirs to novels. Using these same two groups' preferences, I've come up with a couple more crap hypothesis: (1.) The easiest foods to eat are wine and Pepperidge Farms products and (2.) in the age of print-on-demand publishing and the Espresso book machine, typing = writing.

Updated 11/22: While disagreeing views are always welcome, please try and keep things civil. Inappropriate comments will be deleted (and this is coming from a site/staff that, in past week alone, has referred to itself as “failures,” “mediocre lovers,” “bitches,” “impotent,” “bitter old a-holes,” and “backwoods, book-loving belligerents”).

Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips(as found on twitter) Part II!

2009-11-17T12:00:00.014-05:00

The response to our original Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips over on the NaNoWriMo forum was so positive (well, except for the angry and damning responses, but who listens to those b*tches?) that we decided to put together a follow-up post. To keep things fresh, all of today's fictitious Tweets come courtesy of the NaNoWriMo forum members and the commentors on our LiveJournal page. Needless to say, all hate mail should be directed their way.

1 by Strawhenge:

@Chucky_P #NaNoWriMo tip: I am Jack's repeated sentence to convey tedium and madness.

1 by Ken Dee:

@M_ Crichton#NaNoWriMo tip: Copy entire chapters from science books as dialog. worked for all my books.

1 by Simmons:

@JaneA. #NaNoWriMo tip: It will do very well, if you please, to continually and properly refer to everyone as his or her well deserved title, always.

1 by Malfoys_Olive:

@Homer #NaNoWriMo tip: Begin in the middle of ur story, have MC recite entire story from beginning. Also refer to every1 in enumeratio (i.e. Apollo, the son of Zues)

1 by SlackJawedSmurf:

@JesusHChrist #NaNoWriMo tip: Have half ur book B backstory/prologue. Then have the main novel told from p.o.v. of several different people. Kill off a few characters, resurrect some, add an epilogue, hint at a sequel.

1 by unconventionalwriter:

@T_Pratchett #NaNoWriMoTip Put as many obscure philosophies & life lessons as U can. Also include scenes w/ Death, the representation.

2 by hasse:

@Will.i.am.Faulkner #NaNoWriMo tip: Emotions, descriptions, random outbursts of thought are all wonderful. Go for 100+ in 1 sentence!

@THE_BaRd #NaNoWriMo tip:Thou shalt not be brief. Brevity is the soul of wit, but wit shall come w/ edits. 4 now, debateth every action: 2 be, or not 2 be? Marry, decide later.

2 by a_tannenbaum:

@R_Chandler: Become an alcoholic & get fired from yr job in the midst of the Depression. If that doesn't force U 2 take up writing seriously, NOTHING will.

@HenryJames: My preferred method is a sort of thinking aloud, as it were, or more precisely, upon the page, thereby producing longish paragraphs which proceed, in a desultory way, from place to place, sometimes arriving somewhere, as if by accident and with an embarrassed air, as if not knowing how they got there; and sometimes, of course, not arriving anywhere in particular, though always ready to resume the journey, to who knows whither to find who knows what, and so, by an earnest seeking after truth, to come at last to the final shore of another completed novel, with maunderings and hesitations and vagueness enough to perplex scholars and bemuse the public.

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing NaNoWriMo Writers

2009-11-17T08:00:00.003-05:00

This week's installment of Tuesday's Tips is dedicated to those delusional dilettantes who have taken up the National Novel Writing Month challenge: The completion of a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. Having passed the halfway mark two days ago, I thought I'd offer these marathon imagineers the bookstore blogger's equivalent of a paper cup filled with lukewarm water -- randomly selected writing links!

You're 25,000 words in and suddenly it hits you: What if the book I'm writing isn't the "right" book? (Via.)

Or maybe you're having the opposite problem. Maybe you're 25,000 words in and already wondering, 'Hmn...What To Write Next?'

Then again, what if your problem isn't with what you are writing, but why you're not writing? Christina Baker offers a possible cure with Break the Block in Five Minutes. (Via.)

Did you know that in the time it took you to read these links, you could've already written another 200 words? S'true. Still, what's the rush? When writing anything of value, It Takes The Time It Takes.

With only 13 days and half a novel to go, editing may not be on the top of your to-do list. So why not try and kill two birds with one stone -- editing while you write. Copyblogger covers this concept in a piece titled, How To Write With A Knife.

Last but not least, Write to Done has 5 Simple First Draft Secrets. (An unsolicited 6th: Remember, first drafts are like learning to cook when you know you're the only one who's gonna eat it. Worse comes to worst, you stick your finger down your throat and vomit/place your finger firmly on the Delete key and curse the muse.)

Related:
Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips (as found on twitter)
Top 10 Night Before NaNoWriMo Tweets
Tuesday's Tips for NaNoWriMo Writers 11/3/9

Lack of Funds Leaves €3m Library Full, Closed

2009-11-16T14:31:00.003-05:00

The Independent.ie reports: It has been feted internationally and at home as an outstanding example of Irish architecture. But a state-of-the-art €3m library -- which was recently one of nine Irish nominees at prestigious international architecture awards -- is sitting idle because there is no money to hire staff to work there.
To read the rest, click here.

Call me a cynic...

2009-11-16T11:04:00.002-05:00

...but when I read that an anonymous patron recently returned two high-school library books that were due back in 1958 (along with a $1000 money order!), my first thought was: Either this guy's trying to temporarily alleviate himself of the guilt over the dozens of dismembered bodies buried in his backyard, or having overdue library books was actually the worst thing he'd ever done in his life. Either way, I'd hate to have him as a dinner guest.

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-16T08:00:00.004-05:00

Good news for Goodwill: Your free-standing bookstore is the only bookstore making any money. Bad news for Goodwill: Y'all are beggars, and where's the pride in that?

Bad News for Borders: The economists at The Motley Fool think you're going to go the same route as Circuit City. Good news for Borders: My brother who doesn't read thinks you're rad.

Clip and save: A wallet-sized cheat-sheet listing the many lies and mistakes found in Sarah Palin's soon-to-be bestseller, Going Rogue. Now you're really gonna be a blast to have at parties.

A nose always knows: "The complex perfume of aging books" has been broken down into its "component chemicals" by research scientists who hope this can be used to help with preservation and restoration.

I only care cuz it'll make me money: When Stephenie Meyer was on Oprah last week, a gaggle of giggling schoolgirls asked if there would be a fifth book in the Twilight series. While the answer was originally "cut for time," Meyer's response has since shown up online.

4 Fun Comics-Related Links

2009-11-13T16:47:00.007-05:00

The Beat put up a funny post about the 'Brokeback Pose,' a.k.a. the stereotypical superheroine pose where you can see the heroine's breasts and bum at the same time.

More controversial imagery from an industry imbued with it: Every Day Is Like Wednesday highlights 8 Inappropriate Pictures from one of Marvel's "Appropriate for ages 9 and up" Comics.

I was born a few years too late to enjoy this particular cultural touchstone, but Maxim's 12 Superheroes Who Should Be On '70s Vans makes me wish I was around when the airbrush artist was king.

And if I could only pick one link for you to click? The Best Thing Ever's review of Yotsuba&! If you're not already reading this book, carrying this book, and pushing this book on every customer with good taste that walks through your bookstore's door, NOW'S THE TIME TO START.

Recommended Viewing:You Should Judge A Book By Its Cover

2009-11-13T12:00:00.001-05:00

Pilfered with pride from We Sing Sin.

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-13T08:23:00.003-05:00

THB and Heavy Liquid creator Paul Pope just won the 'Silver Dildo' for Sexiest Art at the first annual Fleshbot Awards. You can peep some of Pope's work here.

FOX 6 News reports: 'Man Burglarizes Christian Bookstore, Stealing $8.' Jesus, I guess Bible bookstores aren't doing much better business than us sin-filled shops.

1990s comics superstar Peter Bagge recently posted a comic strip about the extreme reactions Ayn Rand's work inspires in today's politically polarized populace. It's called 'Will Everyone Please Stop Freaking Out Over Ayn Rand?!?'

Further proof that the publishing industry isn't looking for 'The Next Big Thing,' but instead, 'The Last Big Thing,' Little Brown has inked a five book deal with Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler...for five new Lemony Snicket books.

Go, Look: 11 Films About Writing

2009-11-12T10:05:00.005-05:00

StumbleUponUs.com has either one-upped the typical Top 10 list, or fallen two short of the fabled baker's dozen. Whichever, the flicks picked are all great...well, except for Shakespeare In Love.
Writers looking for an excuse not to write -- this one's for you. Go, look!

Adaptation News: No Prose Purists Allowed!

2009-11-12T08:00:00.005-05:00

Will Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson be donning the black and gold tights required to play Captain Marvel's arch nemesis, Black Adam? Um...maybe.

Sometimes the best way to introduce a link is to just quote the linked-to article's title: J.J. Abrams Finishes Reading Dark Tower, Decides Not To Adapt It. Ouch.

Jerry "Mick Jagger's ex-wife" Hall is set to star in a BBC adaptation of Martin Amis' 1984 no vel, Money. As the last time anyone anywhere gave a damn about Ms. Hall was sometime in the mid-eighties, this sounds like the perfect fit.

I know one movie I won't be watching! Winona Ryder and Barry Pepper will star in the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story. The ten-tissue telepic is based on the 12-step book by William Borchert.

Stephenie Meyer will appear on Oprah this Friday to talk millionaire to millionaire about the upcoming New Moon film. For uncomfortable kicks, will someone in the audience please ask O why she never chose a Twilight book for her Book Club?

A bankruptcy judge has ruled that Warren Beatty's suit against the Tribune Co. can go forward. Beatty is suing the bankrupt corporation over the TV and movie rights to Dick Tracy, while the Tribune Co. probably just wants to stop Beatty from making any more sh*tty Dick Tracy films.

Go, Look: 60 Ways to Read Watchmen

2009-11-11T15:06:00.005-05:00

The Trouble With Comics has compiled a super-long, super-smart list of sixty distinct thematic, artistic, historical, and humorous angles with which to approach Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic comic book mini-series. (Via: CBR)
Go, look!

An Indie Bookseller's Job Is...

2009-11-11T12:00:00.007-05:00

... akin to those folks working at Plimoth Plantation. We're a living, breathing memorial to the "good ol' days," only instead of period pilgrim clothes, we dress in coffee-stained cardigans.

...the three Rs: Restaurant recommendations, restroom attendant, and real life MapQuest to the nearest Borders.

...to write down recommendations so that 'customers' can purchase your store's staff picks elsewhere.

...to act as the Wile E. Coyote to the online shopper's Roadrunner. Chase, chase, chase. Fail, fail, fail.

...the first line of defense against poorly put together print-on-demand books.

...to fake smiles, interest, and aesthetic approval.

...list making, link blogging, Twittering trivia.

...sorta depressing when you really stop and think about it.

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-11T08:00:00.003-05:00

The Guardian UK imitates the impotent ire of indie British booksellers, b*tches about How Waterstone's Killed Bookselling.

Holy crap. Bookstore employees have rights? And they stand up for them? Publicly? And in the press? Wait, why wasn't I told about this?

Mr. Rogers was an inspiration to countless puppet-loving, trolley obsessed, postman-fetishizing kids. So why the hell are they defaming his memory with this stomach-churning statue?

Admission time: Do you want to know the reason I started dedicating Tuesday's posts to writing links and Thursday's to adaptation news? So I could break up the days between Sarah Palin posts. That said, it's been almost 24 hours. Here's the "leaked" details of Palin 's "roguish book tour."

Crain reports that Amazon flew out "a dozen of New York's top literary agents" last week. The point of this powwow? To reassure the agents that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is "not trying to destroy publishing as we know it." Check your favorite agents' Twitter feeds to see if they were part of this whorish pilgrimage.

Parental Advisory: Kids Lit Links

2009-11-10T12:00:00.005-05:00

YourTango.com offers an easy out to easily embarrassed parents: Use Kid Lit to Teach Your Kids About Sex. (Via.)

The Telegraph UK proclaims 'Comic books are good for children's learning!' (But then, they spell 'color' with a U, so what do they know?)

My favorite new time-killer of a blog? Curious Pages, a self-described hub of "recommended inappropriate books for kids."

A former vicar turned bestselling children’s author has accused the Church of England of being “largely irrelevant” and a “spiritual arm of New Labour.” (But then, he spells 'labor' with a U, so what does he know?)

Quick Question

2009-11-10T11:17:00.001-05:00

If we had a drag queen dress up as Sarah Palin for a reading and 'signing,' would you attend? And more importantly, would you buy a book?

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

2009-11-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

Rewriting the rewritten for the umpteenth time? Kidlit.com wonders, How Much Revision is Necessary?

Don't worry, R. Crumb -- jerking off to your own work isn't one of Fuel for Your Writing's 8 Nasty Writing Habits You Should Quit.

While some lucky sonsofb*tches were having sex with their teachers, you and I were picking up the 7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School.

Hope for the dying and decrepit: Writers Digest's Publish Your First Book After 50. (I mean, you're still gonna die, but at least you'll die published.)

You're a name on the internet and a celebrity in the blogosphere. Chris Anderson tells you how to turn that exposure into book sales.

3 Choice Tweets

2009-11-09T16:13:00.005-05:00

@McMer314: Amused that the health care bill is about as long as Harry Potter 5. Except that people actually read HP5. http://bit.ly/JQqWG

@vromans: Linda Bukowski said that Charles cried at the end of Star Wars. "It was something about Chewbacca."

@theBDR: I was going to take my daughter to the public library today, but, you know, socialism...

(Oh, and by the by, we're on Twitter, too.)

The Cover Art of Superstar Graphic Designer Rodrigo Corral

2009-11-09T12:00:00.003-05:00

The name Rodrigo Corral may not fire off any synapses in your brain, but a quick look at some of his cover art will surely set your sense memory atwitter. Dude not only did the cover art compiled below, he's also responsible for the covers to James Frey's infamous A Million Little Pieces and Junot Diaz' Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. To see more of Corral's book covers, as well as some of his magazine work, click here. For a 5 question interview with Corral, click here.

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Justin A. Frank

Him Her Him Again The End of Him by Patricia Marx
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
Here's How I See It, Here's How It Is by Heather Henson

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-09T08:00:00.004-05:00

Glenn Beck: Cry-baby, paranoid conspiracy theorist...and thriller fic's #1 sales booster?

Find out if the rumors about Robin are true. Queersupe has compiled an A-Z list of gay comic book characters.

Do it for Johnny! Er...make that, "Do it for money!" Outsiders author S.E. Hinton plans to cash-in with a li'l comics work.

Sarah Palin's book tour kicked off Nov. 1, and she's purposefully avoiding cities with predominantly Democratic voters and early civil rights adopters. For a detailed itinerary, click here.

Single mom? Check. Nearly broke? You betcha. Novel rejected by multiple publishers before a surprise bidding war resulted in a million dollar book deal? Is there any other way? Well, that settles it. Rebecca James is officially this month's 'Next J.K. Rowling.'

Firelight: A Twilight Movie for the Rest Of Us

2009-11-08T12:02:00.002-05:00

Bookish Conspiracy Du Jour

2009-11-06T13:30:00.001-05:00

Valentines Day is to greeting card companies what NaNoWriMo is to print on demand websites.

Knitted Covers to Classic Novels

2009-11-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

Wanna see more of Olympia Le-Tan's work? Click here and/or here.

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

One less reason to visit your neighborhood bookstore: Google Magazines! (Sniff, sniff. We'll miss your awkward porno purchases.)

One more reason to visit your neighborhood bookstore: Borders will shutter approximately 200 of its remaining 330 mall-based Waldenbooks by January. Feign surprise. (Via)

Over at The Huffington Post, Debbie Stier asks (and answers!) the question, Does Twitter really sell books? (Via: Twitter -- proof that it's good for at least one thing.)

This Sunday's New York Times will feature a list of 2009's Top 10 Illustrated Books. To learn what the lemmings will be requesting en masse, head on over to EarlyWord.com. (Just do us a favor and ignore their embedded Amazon links, okay?)

Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips(as found on twitter)

2009-11-05T15:00:00.003-05:00

Here's a li'l something for those insane souls who have taken up the National Novel Writing Month challenge (a.k.a. the completion of a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days). It's a collection of famous authors' Tweets re: your unwieldy undertaking. Some of their tips will surely help you with your writing, the others will simply kill a couple seconds. Either way, they'll prove a temporarily distraction from your writer's block.

@C_Bushnell #NaNoWriMo tip:Use SpiceGirls speak.Instead of "Whaddya want?" say "Tell me what you want,what you really really want" +8 words!

@Steph_Meyer #NaNoWriMo tip: @C_Bushnell: I have one, too!!! Use "oh my god" instead of OMG. +2 words!!!

@JRR_Tolkien #NaNoWriMo tip: My favorite word count cheat? Write a poem in Elvish, then, in the next paragraph, translate it in2 English.

@JimCarroll #NaNoWriMo tip: It's not easy to stay awake and writing for 30 days straight. I recommend crystal meth and frappuccinos.

@AnneFrank #NaNoWriMo tip: Avoid distractions! When I wrote my book, I locked myself in the attic & refused to let any1 in.

@S_Palin #NaNoWriMo MEMOIR tip: My real life sex w/ Todd lasts a minute & a 1/2. To add Xtra words I lie about 4play ;)

@JK_GrrRowling #NaNoWriMo tip: Pacing 1self is 4 muggles. Finish all 50k words by the 15th, leaving plenty o time for sequels & lawsuits.

@Maya_Angelou #NaNoWriMo tip: In 'Aliens from Planet Zyx' I had a character recite the 1st act of Hamlet on a dare. Hella word count bump

@PlaywrightGibson #NaNoWriMo tip: Deaf characters r great. They force other characters 2 constantly repeat themselves, thereby adding words

@TheRealMelville #NaNoWriMo tip: Give a character a peg leg. You'd be surprised how many extra words U can get from sound effects alone!

@$tephenKing #NaNoWriMo tip: The number 1 tip for increasing word count? "Adverbs," he said slowly, succinctly, solemnly.

Related:
Tuesday's Tips for NaNoWriMo Writers
Top 10 Night Before NaNoWriMo Tweets
Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips (as found on Twitter) Part II!

Underwhelming Adaptation News(don't say I didn't warn you)

2009-11-05T08:00:00.006-05:00

Those wacky Twilight books are being adapted again. This time, as Barbie dolls.

Entertainment Weekly has "first look" photos of the film version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and honestly...meh.

Equally unimpressive, the trailer for How To Train Your Dragon is now online. Ah, generic CGI cartoons -- I hate you and the stupid families that make you profitable.

The New York Times feigns surprised at what computers can do these days, heaping hyperbolic praise upon Robert Zemeckis' 3D/CGI A Christmas Carol.

Big budget television adaptations of four of China's most popular novels have the world's largest country glued to their sets. For a peek at what all of the hub-bub is about, click here.

2005's Sin City is one of those films that seems better and better the longer it's been since you've watched it. Apparently, directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller agree: Filming of the sequel will begin in the second half of 2010.

The NYTimes again, this time with a puff piece about Peter Jackson and his upcoming Lovely Bones adaptation. In it, you'll learn that Jackson had to approach this film in a 'different manner' than he did his gory, low budget ghost pics. I never would've guessed!

Hypocritical Zealots Propose Pre-Approved Reading Lists

2009-11-04T14:38:00.007-05:00

Catholic school administrators are proposing all books undergo a central review & approval process before being allowed into the classroom. As a former Child of God who -- on repeated occasions -- successfully masturbated to the Song of Solomon, I've gotta ask: Will the metaphor-heavy softcore smut contained therein be enough to get the Bible banned?

Book News, In Brief

2009-11-04T08:00:00.003-05:00

An old man hollers hyperbole, makes national headlines. (Or: John Grisham proclaims printed books an 'endangered species.')

The late Stieg Larsson's girlfriend and family can only agree on one thing -- Death: It's all fun and games until it's time to split up the dead dude's fortune.

Journali sta! tipped me off to this next one, and it's as depressing as it is funny: A scan of cartoonist Horst Rosenthal's 1942 satirical tour of a Nazi internment camp...drawn just before Rosenthal was killed in Auschwitz later that year...and "starring" Mickey Mouse.

The owner of San Francisco's Ocean Avenue Books took offense at a Yelp reviewer labeling her store a "TOTAL MESS," tracked down his address (which he'd never even given to Yelp), and tried to force her way into his home. Looks like the thin line between 'crazy cat person' and 'bookstore with cat' just got a li'l bit thinner.

The Minnesota Post's Joe Kimball has a nice write-up about the W/T/A Price Wars. Unlike most of the other articles out there, Kimball keeps things fact based and relatively unbiased, resisting the urge to pen paeans to the indies. That said, as soon as he passes the mic to said indies, they can't wait to nominate themselves for sainthood. Yay us!

Bookish T-Shirt of the Day

2009-11-03T13:30:00.000-05:00

It's comfy cuz it's true!
(To order, click here.)

Go, Look: The Comics Reporter on The Best American Comics 2009

2009-11-03T12:00:00.004-05:00

In his review of the '09 edition of The Best American Comics, The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon does a great job describing the mental push and pull of these inherently argument-inducing 'Best Of' books. I particularly like the line, "Most passionate comics readers with the ability to do so read the best the medium has to offer (at least in their view) somewhere between two months before the book comes out to two weeks after it hits the stands." In my opinion, this is the capital-d Difference between the target audience of The Best American Comics collections and those of the, say, poetry and short story collections. Most comics readers (myself included) are hyper-obsessive, highly opinionated motherf*ckers who -- before they've even opened a 'Best Of' book -- have already cataloged a laundry list of stories and strips that they believe are waaay more worthy of inclusion than the ones being blurbed on the cover. I mean, I may be wrong, but I doubt the folks reading The Best American Magazine Writing 2009 feel that they've read the lion's share of this year's premier periodical pieces, but I know for damned sure that your average comics reader believes they've read the best that their chosen art form has to offer. They're assh*les like that. (Myself included.)
Anyway, I'm rambling. Click here to read similar ideas expressed more succinctly.

Tuesday's Tips for NaNoWriMo Writers

2009-11-03T08:00:00.004-05:00

This week's installment of Tuesday's Tips is dedicated to those insane souls who have taken up the National Novel Writing Month challenge: The completion of a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. While some of the tip's titles may seem sorta obvious, I'd still recommend checking them out. After all, you're attempting to write a book in a month. You're gonna need all the help you can get.

With NaNowriMo already 36 hours in (EST), it may be a bit late to point you towards Robot's 6's advice regarding Hooking Readers in the First 8 Pages.

Keep in mind, though, that hooking the reader is only the beginning (literally!). Once that's accomplished, you've gotta figure out a way to keep them hooked. How? Cliffhangers.

As the pile of paper you hope to hold in your hands come December 1st will be -- at best -- a first draft, Between Fact & Fiction's Tips for First Drafting seems pretty damned apt.

There's no two ways about it -- 50,000 words is a lot of words. The temptation to pad things out with a bunch of thesaurus entries will no doubt prove awfully tempting. But when choosing words, should you eschew the arcane? (Or, to put it simpler: Big words -- yes or no?)

The Writer's Digest's 4 Techniques to Fire Up Your Fiction is actually closer to 27 techniques, as each of the aforementioned 4 are outline headings with 6 or 7 sub-divisions. Tricky? Yes. But who in their right mind is gonna purposefully click on a link boasting over two dozen writing tips when they're frantically trying to type 1,667 words per day?

To close this out, I'm offering a special link to those of you who promised your friends and family that you would not be participating in this year's madness. Consider it a sort of self-help group for folks trying to kick the NaNoWriMo habit: All Things Good's Saying No NaNoWriMo.

Related: Top 10 Night Before NaNoWriMo Tweets