Isn’t it funny when people get all excited about things that aren’t actually happening? Y’know, like Jesus coming back. Speaking of Jesus, his foreskin makes an appearance in Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, soon to be Clark Gregg’s Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, soon to be my second favorite Palahniuk adaptation of my least favorite Palahniuk novel.
Red band trailer here.
Starting in October, DC Public Libraries will be forced to reduce hours due to budget cuts. The reduced hours will close ALL libraries on Fridays, move weekday opening times later and closing times earlier, and remove up to 5 neighborhood “kiosks” in the city’s most under-served areas.
However, if the library’s proposed budget is reinstated by the city the closings may not have to happen….stay tuned.
Photo courtesy of RG25’s flickr.
Filed under: Books
So my dad’s been working on this book about his obsession with soccer for the past three or four years now, and he just recently self-published it through iUniverse. This week it popped up on B&N and Amazon, as well a couple of UK booksellers’ sites (e.g. Waterstone’s), so I thought I’d give it a brief shout out here. It’s pretty hefty in price tag and size ($29.95, 480 pages) but check out the jacket description after the jump:
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Filed under: Books
Or so goes the Dante-inspired title of Dinaw Mengestu’s debut novel, which revolves around Ethiopian immigrant Sepha Stephanos’ experiences owning an ailing grocery shop in Northwest DC. Mengestu himself emigrated from Addis Ababa to a Chicago suburb with his family when he was two; he later attended Georgetown and eventually earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia.
My expectations are either wildly too high or wildly too low to read Palahniuk without bias anymore, but I’m gonna go ahead and recommend his latest, Snuff, about a 600-dude gangbang and all the (literally) slippy and (literally) shocking machinations thereof. Neither as ambitious nor as messy as 2007’s terrific Rant, it feels a lot slighter than that effort, or really any of Chuck’s previous novels. Then again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing– an extended Haunted whore story is still a great way to pass a plane ride.
Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk, is out May 20th. Preoder here.
If you haven’t read Alan Moore’s groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen, then you may think you can’t possibly sit through another big screen superhero flick, but trust me, this is no Daredevil we’re talking about. Watchmen (originally published as a miniseries from 1986-87) is a pitch-black take on the superhero mythos, with flawed-yet compelling characters and a depth of storytelling that’s still all too rare in the genre. Hell, Time Magazine even included Watchmen on its list of the 100 All-Time Novels. Needless to say, it’s a revered work, so the internets were in a bit of a tizzy when the long-rumored screen adaptation began gearing up. But fanboy rancor was soon averted after Watchmen director Zack Snyder unleashed a little film called 300 lat year. This guy is serious about his comics, and serious about being faithful to them, as evidenced by this comic to storyboard to film comparison. Today Warner Brothers has released the first character shots of the principal cast, and not only do they not look hokey as hell (I’m looking at you, entire cast of Fantastic Four!), they look true to the original character designs and badass in a believable, I’d-but-a-ticket-to-that kind of way.
Filed under: Books
Anne Lamott tonight at 7 PM at Olsson’s. Yeah, “unconventional” to say the least.
The TV series lives on in comic book form, and in the next issue (out this week) the world’s cutest vampire slayer sleeps with girls!
Yay or nay?
Filed under: Books
Pulitzer Prize winning author Steven Millhauser’s recently released collection of thirteen short stories is my favorite book of 2008 so far. Might be yours, too.
“Cat ‘n’ Mouse” from the NY Times. “History of a Disturbance” and “In the Reign of Harad IV” at The New Yorker.
