December 20, 2013 On the Shelf, Our Daily Correspondent The Horror, and Other News By Sadie Stein Check out this new Heart of Darkness, illustrated by Matt Kish … if you dare. By now you have probably heard the allegations that Shia LaBeouf allegedly plagiarized a Daniel Clowes book. Then he plagiarized his apology. Now, there’s this. This Detroit residency just gives writers houses. Forever. The word Americans hate.
December 19, 2013 On the Shelf Harry Potter Looks Different, and Other News By Sadie Stein Hunger Games vs. Twilight: a textual analysis. Endangered shop alert: Main Street Books in St. Charles, Missouri, needs a buyer. But for once it’s not all gloom and doom; the store is solvent, and the owners say they simply want to travel and spend more time with their grandchildren. Twelve deeply weird Christmas stories. Artist Jim Kay is illustrating the reissue of the Harry Potter series, and it is my sad duty to inform you that word makeover is being employed.
December 18, 2013 On the Shelf Lisbeth Salander Lives Again, and Other News By Sadie Stein Amazon workers in Germany have gone on strike (at what we need not say is a busy time). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lives on: using Stieg Larsson’s comprehensive outlines, a new writer will reanimate the Millennium series. The British Library has made available a million images from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century books for public use. Not shockingly, people are less than chuffed about Jason Segel as DFW: John Gallagher calls it “a terrible, terrible idea.”
December 17, 2013 On the Shelf Apollinaire on Trial, and Other News By Sadie Stein Apollinaire (or, at any rate, his Turkish publisher) is on trial in Istanbul. Sofia Coppola is set to adapt Alysia Abbott’s 1970s San Francisco-set Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. The American Library Association has named ten librarians from across the United States to be winners of the I Love My Librarian award. Each honoree will receive $5,000. Buzzfeed brings us fourteen places to talk to a stranger about books. Elevators and playgrounds feel potentially problematic, but what do we know?
December 16, 2013 On the Shelf Darcy vs. Knightley, and Other News By Sadie Stein Elif Batuman defends the end-of-year list, in a list. Here are all the best books of 2013 lists. Celebrity death match, Austen style: favorite Mr. Darcy versus dark horse Mr. Knightley. Geek, “a person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a specific subject,” has been named the word of the year by the Collins online dictionary.
December 13, 2013 On the Shelf Animating the Diary, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Elmore was the coolest guy I knew,” says Leonard’s son Peter. The Diary of Anne Frank is being turned into an animated film for children. The tenth annual Tournament of Books longlist! Margaret Wrinkle is the winner of the Center for Fiction’s 2013 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, for Wash.