As part of the latest chapter of the McConnaissance, Matthew McConaughey has been tipped to star in The Stand, the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s famous novel. McConnaughey is expected to play Randall Flagg, the malevolent sorcerer and necromancer. In the words of director Josh Boone, who also directed The Fault in our Stars, the movie will be “the Godfather of post-apocalyptic thrillers.” This might be a good time to read our own Lydia Kiesling on growing up with Stephen King.
El Diablo
Read a Book. It’s Good for You.
Good news for us bookworms. New research indicates that regular reading and writing activity throughout one’s life can “slow down cognitive decline in old age.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Yu, French, Stein, Smith
Charles Yu’s new collection of stories, Sorry Please Thank You, is out today, and so is Tana French’s novel Broken Harbor. Both were on our Great Second Half of 2012 Books Preview. Leigh Stein’s new book of poems, Dispatch from the Future is also in stores today, alongside Ali Smith’s There But For The in paperback.
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On Hikikomoris, Etc.
Recommended Reading: Larissa Pham on Milena Michiko Flašar’s I Called Him Necktie.
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Citizen on the Stage
Claudia Rakine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was included in our own list of “Nine Books for the Post-Ferguson Era,” has been adapted for the stage, and previews are beginning in Los Angeles. Graywolf, the independent press behind Citizen, The Empathy Exams and On Immunity: An Inoculation, has interviewed the playwright behind the adaptation about the project and his process. As he explains it, “what makes the book—and the theatre piece—unique is that they expose and illuminate the small, sometimes unintended, and unconscious acts of everyday racism. Subtle, insidious, soul-crushing.”
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Packing (Books) for Mars
What do you do when you’re trapped in a Mars-bound space capsule for five hundred and twenty days? Well, if you’re like Italian/Colombian space engineer Diego Urbina, you read twenty seven books, including those by Gabriel García Márquez.
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Any director who compares a movie he hasn’t even made to The Godfather is already setting himself up for failure and is probably a hack to begin with. Just because your teen weepie made a hundred million dollars doesn’t mean you’re a genius. But in a culture that equates money with intelligence I’m not surprised to hear this guy thinks this way about himself.