Casting for Josh Boone’s movie adaptation of John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is coming together nicely. This past week, it was announced that Laura Dern has joined the cast as the mother of Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley). Production is set to begin next month. A few months back, our own Janet Potter wrote that, “besides a small infinity of other things, [this book] will make you cry.”
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This Bug’s Life
Tea with beetles, chess and lemonade with butterflies, laundry day with a praying mantis–it’s the stuff of children’s books and the dioramas of San Francisco artist Lisa Wood, now on display at The Gold Bug in Pasadena, CA.
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Crime and Punishment and Singing
Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s Crime and Punishment is getting the musical treatment, and though “it does not seem the most likely candidate to provide musical fun for all the family” for a long list of reasons – “heavy drinking, prostitution, a double axe murder and hours of psychological torment” – we’re already planning our trips to Moscow for the premier. This is also a good opportunity to revisit the debate over who’s greater, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?
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When He Was Good
The 80th birthday of Philip Roth inspires a festschrift of sorts over at New York Magazine, with Sam Lipsyte, Kathryn Schulz, James Franco (natch), and others weighing in on Roth’s Best Book and other vexed questions. (For the record, it’s Sabbath’s Theater.)
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Music and Lyrics
DJ Poet Laureate
California poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera dropped in on NPR as guest DJ last week, and you can listen to the full thirty-minute radio show, as well as five of the tracks he played.