The Cleveland Plain-Dealer published an interview with Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, reportedly his first since 1989. The Washington Post talked to the Plain-Dealer reporter about how he scored an interview with the reclusive cartoonist.
Bill Watterson Speaks
In the Distance, a Dog Barked
At Slate, Rosecrans Baldwin notes “Pick up just about any novel and you’ll find a throwaway reference to a dog, barking in the distance.” Amazingly enough, he’s right.
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Showtime Snags Rights to Clinton-Patterson Collaborative Novel
Former President Bill Clinton and best-selling powerhouse James Patterson‘s upcoming novel, The President is Missing, has been acquired as a Showtime television series, according to Vulture. There are few details about the series because the thriller won’t be released until June 2018. See also: our own Bill Morris on reading Patterson for the first time.
Recalibrating the Hype Game
Three Guys One Book wonders why publishers aren’t more aggressive about drumming up pre-publication hype, instead admonishing media outlets to hold their coverage until after the books are published.
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New Releases: Foer, Coupland, King
Stephen King’s latest, Under the Dome, is out today. It’s 1,100 pages and is being compared to The Stand. Meanwhile, Generation A by Douglas Coupland is also hitting shelves. It’s a sequel to Coupland’s famous, influential debut, Generation X. Also out last week was Jonathan Safran Foer’s treatise on vegetarianism, Eating Animals, which picked up a mixed review in the New Yorker.
Martin Amis in The Globe and Mail
Martin Amis is interviewed in The Globe and Mail: “All my novels are feminist from about 1980 on.”
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“Young at Heart”
A new YA series spun off from The X-Files explores Fox Mulder’s teen years, and you can read the first chapter here. You may also be forgiven for feeling like the entire premise is a bit fraught. Not only is the mental image of Spooky Mulder with acne a tad jarring, but on a more existential level, as Zan Romanoff has written for our site, “there is no such thing as the young adult novel.”
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