Sometime Ph.D candidate, sometime actor, and ubiquitous lit blog all-star James Franco (henceforth known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”) has begun filming an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God in West Virginia, and I’m reminded of that line from W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” — “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
There’s Franco in My McCarthy
Linguistics
Leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary folks to put a damper on the linsane amount of eponyms based on Jeremy Lin’s surname.
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Kerouac Returns to the Big Screen
This November, moviegoers can catch an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur (trailer here). Do you think it looks better than last year’s cinematic version of On the Road (trailer here)?
Tuesday New Release Day: Fallon, Brown, Sriracha
New this week is a debut collection of loosely linked stories that’s been getting some attention. Military families are the common theme in Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone. Another newly released debut is Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters about a Shakespeare scholar’s three daughters, all named after characters from the Bard’s plays. Also new this week, a tome dedicated to the “hot” condiment of the moment, The Sriracha Cookbook.
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Hazlitt, will publish.
Random House Canada launched a new website yesterday, and a new internet magazine to go along with it. There’s a piece from Hari Kunzru on Werner Herzog, and I’m especially taken with this one from Emily Landau on Christopher Hitchens and David Rakoff.
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The Old Media Green
In case you were wondering why “old media” companies continue to cling to print: Based on ad revenue, a print reader is worth $709, while an online reader is worth just $46. (via)
Read Dickens Now!
Charles Dickens turns 200 in February, which is one good explanation for two new biographies (Charles Dickens: A Life) and (Becoming Dickens) appearing just in time. But even more importantly, why is now the perfect time to read him? Here’s one hint: the man’s vast social imagination.
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