Authors

Fake Movie Trailer For a Real Book

Great Western Dragon — Tue, 13 May 2008 19:15:13 -0500

You know, for any other author, it'd be strange to make a movie trailer for a movie mentioned in the book. Then again, you could accuse Chuck Palahniuk of many things and normalcy really isn't one of them.

To promote his new book, Snuff, the author of Choke and Fight Club, Chuck had some folks make a trailer for a movie the character stars in. Now then, it should be noted that the character involved is an aging porn star so this trailer, while clean enough for YouTube, is so insanely not safe for work you'd be far better off watching it at home.

So pour a glass of cheap bubbly and viddy the trailer for The Wizard of Ass starring Cassie Wright, the vixen we know (not really) from such classics as Chitty Chitty Gang Bang and The Twilight Bone.

Charlie Brown and his authenticity

zzshupinga — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:57:10 -0500

Everyone loves Charlie Brown worldwide. Take a listen to this NPR weekend edition on just why people have fallen in love with lovable hero.

Bibliofuture Author Spotlight: Bruce Catton

Bibliofuture — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:22:37 -0500

I have a reference work called "World Authors 1900-1950". Each week I am going to spotlight one author from this work. Serendipity is working well so far. I opened volume one and selected the first author I saw.

Author: Bruce Catton

Bruce was one of the four founders of "American Heritage" magazine and was a notable civil war historian.

Bruce Catton (October 9, 1899 — August 28, 1978) was a journalist and a notable historian of the American Civil War. He won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.

Catton was known as a narrative historian who specialized in popular histories that emphasized the colorful characters and vignettes of history, in addition to the simple dates, facts, and analyses. His works, although well-researched, were generally not presented in a rigorous academic style, supported by footnotes. In the long line of Civil War historians, Catton is arguably the most prolific and popular of all, with Shelby Foote his only conceivable rival. Oliver Jensen, who succeeded him as editor of American Heritage magazine, wrote: "There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton's work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age."

See full Wikipedia entry on Catton

The Bush's "Read All About It" Panned by the New York Times

birdie — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:16:47 -0500

"The belief that books aren’t “real” is exactly what keeps many kids from preferring to read, but while the first lady, Laura Bush, and daughter Jenna Bush are on target with their diagnosis in “Read All About It!” their course of recommended treatment is hard to follow, let alone swallow" says NYT reviewer Roger Sutton about this new title.

On the subject of "Read All About It" (oops, watch out, when you click this link you hear the authors speaking about their book)... Sutton asks "Whom is this book supposed to convince, and of what?" The main character, Tyrone Brown, (“professional student and class clown”) would say, (according to Sutton) "it’s not real. The point is laboriously made, the teachers’ names are dorky, the plot is hectic and the suspense and dialogue are artificial. What child today says “pesky”? (And anyone who has ever shelved books for minimum wage is likely to feel insulted by Tyrone’s aggrieved dismissal of the library: “All I will meet there are stinky pages.”)

Jenna's away on her honeymoon; maybe she won't get a chance to read the review.

Civil Liberties Benefit from Paul Verhaeghen's Art

kmccook — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:26:07 -0500

Paul Verhaeghen has won this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel _Omega Minor_, published by Dalkey Archive Press.
Verhaeghen is donating the £10,000 award to the ACLU.
Read more.

Ayn Rand Studies on Campus, Courtesy of BB&T

Bibliofuture — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:32:08 -0500

This topic has been discussed on LISNEWS before but Morning Edition had a piece today about the topic.

John Allison, CEO of banking giant BB&T, calls Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged "the best defense of capitalism ever written." He says that Rand changed his life, and he's working to ensure that the deceased author isn't left out of the nation's college curricula.

Since 2005, the BB&T Charitable Foundation has given 25 colleges and universities several million dollars to start programs devoted to the study of Rand's books and economic philosophy. In January, the company announced it was donating $1 million to Marshall University in West Virginia.

The money would establish a course dedicated to Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and help create the BB&T Center for the Advancement of American Capitalism on campus.

But not everyone at the university is excited by the gift. Rick Wilson, a sociology instructor at Marshall and head of the West Virginia Economic Justice Project, says that Rand's philosophy, objectivism, is based on the view that selfishness is the only moral value.

Listen to the Morning Edition piece here.

Time for a Change Says Islamic Writer Gamal Banna

birdie — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:39:47 -0500

Egyptian Gamal Banna backs women's right to lead prayers and thinks clerics should adapt to modern times the LA Times reports.

A slight man in a brown suit, whose smooth face belies his 88 years, can slide one from shelves of thousands, brush its cover and tell you a story, whether it be about jihad, St. Francis of Assisi or the labor movement of the 1930s. He has written 120 books himself, many of them about Islam, which to him has too long listened to the restrictive voices of the past. Tellingly, he adds, "They live as if from five centuries ago."

Gamal Banna is one of Islam's leading liberal thinkers. For years he has accused conservative clerics of running a dictatorship that has kept the Koran from speaking to a world much changed since the 7th century revelations of the prophet Muhammad. Banna, whose long-dead brother led a fundamentalist movement that inspired many of his critics, relishes unnerving opponents with opinions that strike at convention.

The great penniless author swindle

Blake — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:35:54 -0500

Judith Flanders Says Very unambitious fraudsters are claiming to be writers as part of a confidence scam. Maybe real authors should follow their lead: we need a few quid

Nabokov Novel to Be Published, Against Dying Wish

Bibliofuture — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:37:36 -0500

Vladimir Nabokov's final work — an unfinished manuscript scholars call The Original of Laura — was meant to be destroyed 30 years ago. When Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft.

But Nabokov's wife, Vera, couldn't bear to destroy her husband's last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now 73, is the Russian novelist's only surviving heir. He says he inherited the problem of whether to honor his father's wishes or save the literary master's last written words for posterity.

Listen to the full story on NPR

Doctorow's Little Brother

woody.evans — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:58:31 -0500

Cory Doctorow (or his publisher) has made parts of his new novel Little brother available as audio -- DRM-free mind you. From BoingBoing:

"The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it, you're free to take up to 30 minutes' worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it's clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you're allowed to do without my permission (of course!)."

There is also an embeddable widget which lets you port the audio sample into your own blog.