The Book Was Better is a podcast that “debates, discusses, and rips into the (often) hastily written and terrible book-of-the-film” adaptations for movies like Wild, Wild West, Hackers, The Net, and (try not to be upset by this one…) Jumanji. (Those episodes can be found here, here, here, and here, respectively.)
The Book Was Better
The Writer as Outsider
"Writers are outsiders, and usually not by their own choosing. It's why they're writers. If they didn't feel alienated from human experience, they wouldn't feel so drawn to writing to make sense of their lives. It's not the outsider's facility for language that makes her a writer — many a student body president or homecoming queen can turn a phrase — but her ability to howl at the moon, on the page." Karen Karbo writes for Powell's Books's blog about how much publishing has changed in the last 20-some years, but she also has a lot of great words about why people would want to deal with writing and publishing in the first place. Pair her smart essay with our own Nick Ripatrazone's piece "Practical Art: On Teaching the Business of Creative Writing."
Book bits – Sherlock, the Unbearable Dave Matthews, Renaming Google Print
Stanford "will rerelease a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes, just as they were originally printed and illustrated in The Strand Magazine."Maciej Ceglowski suggests that Milan Kundera "is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless." And offers up a number of Eastern European books that young lovers might give to one another instead of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.Google Print has been renamed Google Book Search. "Why the change? Well, one factor was all the comments we got about how excited people were that Google Print would help them print out their documents, or web pages they visit -- which of course it won't."
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Remain Ourselves
"Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.” The remarkable love letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger are both touching and predictably philosophical. Here's a jarring, surreal reimagining of three works of Arendt's over at 3:AM Magazine.
There’s A New Oz in Town
The new Wizard of Oz prequel, Oz: The Great and Powerful, which stars Mila Kunis and James Franco among others, has its first official trailer. The film will release in 2013.
The Voice
Whether or not you've read Grace Paley, you're likely to appreciate this George Saunders essay about her, which justifies his contention that she's "one of the great writers of voice of the last century." You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg's tribute to Paley upon her death.
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Twin Peaks literary criticism
With the end of the "Golden Age of TV," let's turn back to the show that started it all: Twin Peaks, "a revelation and inspiration for countless writers coming of age in the early 90s." The new Twin Peaks Project begins with this nostalgic article in The Believer.