from The Guardian

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige – review

‘Dorothy was a monster. A completely terrifying, sweet-talking, party-obsessed, mean, creepy monster’

Amy Gumm was just a girl from Kansas: unpopular, lippy and practically hunted by her school’s very own personal demon, the “ever lovely” Madison Pendleton. Then, one day, a tornado hits her home and Amy is swept away to Oz. Only, it’s not the Oz she’s read about, this Oz has no cheerful munchkins or joyful parades; here in Oz Dorothy rules, and Oz has paid a heavy price for it. Torture, imprisonment and evil punishments are all Amy finds in this new, drained version of the magical land she knew as a child, and she’s a much bigger part of it than she thinks. She’s been recruited by the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked with one mission and one mission only: Dorothy must die.

I’ll admit, at first I didn’t understand all the hype over this book; I mean, a retelling of the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy is evil? It kind of just sounded bizarre. But THEN, I read it and whoa. This book was insanely addictive, it blew me away on so many different levels. Dorothy was a monster. A completely terrifying, sweet-talking, party-obsessed, mean, creepy monster. She is the queen of evil characters in YA. Her insanity just pours out of the pages along with her unnatural lip glossed smile and hypnotic red heels. Yes, the ruby slippers are hypnotic. Paige went there.

As for our heroine Amy Gumm, how can we not adore her? She’s feisty, brave, insecure, grounded, sarcastic (ALWAYS sarcastic, I have never loved dialogue in a novel more) and most importantly, real! She isn’t your typical, crazy talented, beautiful selfless character, she has a real story and a personality you can really relate to.

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from The Sunday Times

Pot of gold awaits sleuth who cracks literary code

The treasure hunt craze triggered by Masquerade in the 1970s is to be recreated by a novelist burying clues to $3m, says Dalya Alberge

Dalya Alberge

IT IS usually the author who makes a fortune from a best-seller but a new series of books is to offer readers the chance to get rich, too.

The Endgame trilogy of adventure stories by James Frey, whose previous works include The Lorien Legacies and I Am Number Four, will challenge readers to solve puzzles, riddles and codes with prizes totalling $3m (£1.8m) available to those who are successful.

The first person who solves the puzzles in Endgame: The Calling, the first book, will win $500,000 (£300,000) in gold coins. For the second book the prize rises to $1m and for the third $1.5m.

The rights to the series are being sold to publishers in 27 countries and Frey is working on a script for the first of three films of the series, which will be financed by 20th Century Fox. The trilogy is published by HarperCollins….

[ click to continue reading at The Sunday Times ]

from The New York Times

[ click to read complete list at NYTimes.com ]

from The Art Newspaper

A million little gardeners

Seedbed, 2010, by Elliott Arkin. Photograph: Amherst College

A Million Little Pieces author James Frey is set to turn the artist Elliott Arkin’s series of sculptures depicting famous artists as garden gnomes into a children’s book, due to be published in 2016. Four years ago, Frey purchased one of the resin works—a miniature lawn-mowing Picasso—from the series, titled A Peaceable Kingdom, 2004-2012, at New York’s Half Gallery, which he co-owned at the time. “It is one of the most brilliantly funny works of art,” Frey says. So when Arkin later asked the author to write a catalogue essay for his exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice last year, Frey suggested a short story. He wound up with enough material for a book and took an option on the rights from Arkin, who says, “I am thrilled to see what narrative James creates.”

[ click to continue reading at In The Frame ]

from the Hampton Union

These kids ‘Wannaread’

North Hampton Library’s summer camp book club a hit

Lisa Tetrault-Zhe Photo Fifth-grade North Hampton School students Calvin and Trevor, and sixth-grade student Dasha, with the grand prize for the summer reading program, Scout the Bear.

By Lisa Tetrault-Zhe

NORTH HAMPTON — Readers in the Camp Wannaread book group kept up their skills and got a sneak peak at a new Gordon Korman novel this summer.

The North Hampton School students in grades four through six who participated in the summer reading club finished “‘The Hypnotists” by Korman, and also had a chance to start the sequel, “Memory Maze.”

“We had 23 kids sign up,” explained children’s librarian Lorreen Keating. “The afterschool book club was such a success, we decided to continue it through the summer.”

On Thursday evening, readers broke into two teams (Rainbow Unicorns and Sandmen, both part of the book). The teams came up with trivia questions from the book, and the team with the most points won extra raffle tickets towards the grand prize (a giant stuffed bear, complete with binoculars).

“Every week there would be one winner of a smaller prize,” said Linda Sherouse, North Hampton School librarian (she also works at NHS library). “These included a reading light, movie tickets, a Barnes & Noble gift card, and a pencil pouch with glow-in-the-dark highlighters.”

One girl joined the club because she wanted an opportunity to further discuss books she’s read.

“I often have trouble finding time to talk with Ms. Sherouse about the books that I’ve read,” said sixth-grade student Dasha. “Joining the group, I got to read more and check in with her.”

Dasha, a self-described avid reader, read 400 hours this summer.

“My favorite books are by J.K. Rowling and the ‘Legend’ series by Marie Lu,” Dasha said. “I also like the ‘Lorien Legacies’ series (by Pittacus Lore).”

[ click to read full article at SeacoastOnline.com ]

from The LA Times

Celebrating Charles Bukowski, ‘poet laureate of L.A. lowlife’

By CAROLYN KELLOGG

Charles Bukowski, “poet laureate of L.A. lowlife,” became one of the best-known poets in America. (Richard Robinson / Black Sparrow Press)

Charles Bukowski was called many things: “poet laureate of L.A. lowlife,” “the enfant terrible of the Meat School poets,” “the prophet of the underemployed” and “a flamboyant provincial.” Those comments are all from our own reporters.

The L.A. Times was slow to warm to Bukowski’s charms. Even in 1985, when he was one of America’s bestselling poets, we were still describing him as “A low-life drifter from out of the ’40s whose gnarled face is to ugliness and abuse what Paul Bunyan’s body was to size and strength.”

Two years later, when Mickey Rourke starred in the semi-biographical film “Barfly” based on Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical novels, the Los Angeles cultural establishment finally, grudgingly, came around.

Bukowski was born in Germany on Aug. 16, 1920. His family soon moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up with an abusive father. He was an outcast in school. He started drinking. He moved around the country, living on the margins, during World War II and after. He wound up back in Los Angeles as unlikely a candidate for becoming a poet, much less an acclaimed one, as you might find.

Of course, that was part of his appeal. Plainspoken poetry set in the streets and bars, peopled by shady characters — including his hard-drinking, big-hearted, angry, gambling, womanizing self. One of our readers, upset by seeing him written about in print, called him “an X-rated Oscar the Grouch,” which might actually not be all that insulting after all.

To celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the poet laureate of L.A. lowlife, here are 18 things he wrote and said and did –

[ click to continue reading at LATimes.com ]

from Comic Book Resources

SDCC: FREY, DASHNER & MORE GO BEYOND THE PAGE

At Comic-Con International 2014, the “Beyond the Page” session featured a panel deep with talent. The artists and writers, which included James Frey, Christ Weitz, James Dashner, Andrew Kaplan, Fred Van Lente, James Silvani, and Melissa De La Cruz, delivered an engaging discussion on the existing and emerging technologies that are transforming the way we both create and consume stories.

Storytelling today can include a myriad of avenues for delivering content from social media, eBooks, webcomics, online video and video games to more traditional forms of media like print, TV and film. However, modern fans are hungry for stories that do more to immerse them in the fictional worlds of the characters.

James Frey of “Endgame” shared his approach to immersing fans into his world saying, “We should be thinking of TV and Movies as parts our toolbox… [but] as we move into the digital future, as writers or story tellers, that we need to start thinking of things beyond the page.”

Frey is a huge advocate of coordinating story content across multiple platforms to deliver strategic pieces of content. “You should be doing things across all [platforms],” Frey said.

Ultimately “Endgame” will feature a cascade of content delivering vehicles: three books, thirty-five novellas, a video game launched by Google, social media featuring character profiles and a YouTube channel. There are three movies in the works at Fox, and a children’s television series. The core of these immersive experiences are the three books that feature puzzles to solve and the hunt for hidden keys that open cases full of money.

In discussing his approach to “Endgame,” Frey explained, “We looked at things like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and thought, “How can we use those to tell additional parts of the story that aren’t on the pages of the book? The thirteen characters in the book have had Twitter feeds, Instagram feeds, and Google Plus feeds for [over] a year. And our You Tube channel has five hours of content on it.”

[ click to continue reading at CBR ]

from Paste

Call Me Ishmael: The Phenomenon Revolutionizing How We Talk About Books

By Emelia Fredlick

“Call me Ishmael.”

It’s one of the most recognizable opening sentences in literature (right up there with “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). And now, the iconic phrase has gained a new life as a multimedia phenomenon.

Call Me Ishmael celebrates the power of literature by giving a person the chance to literally “call Ishmael” and share a story about how a book impacted their life. Many calls are then transcribed and posted on callmeishmael.com, becoming tales that go far beyond traditional book reviews. Titles featured range from The Time Traveler’s Wife to Pajama Time, from Maus to The Catcher in the Rye.

The stories people share are funny, sad, poignant and deeply human, which creator Logan Smalley says is the point. He calls the resulting narrative “an enhanced, evolved and beautiful picture of humanity.”

[ click to continue reading at PASTE ]

from Pioneer Press

Former Hells Angel and cop who chased him share their unlikely friendship

By Kristi Belcamino

Former Hennepin County Sheriff’s Captain Chris Omodt, left, collaborated with Pat Matter, former president of the Minneapolis Hells Angels, to write “Breaking the Code.” (Pioneer Press: Ginger Pinson)

Considered the “godfather” of the Minneapolis Hells Angels, Pat Matter knew three things in life were true:

“When you love someone, you get hurt. … When you’re real, everyone hates you for it. And when you trust, you get killed.”

And yet, Matter found an unlikely man to trust: Chris Omodt — the Hennepin County cop who’d been after him for years.

Two decades after the men first heard of each other, they’re telling the story of their unlikely alliance.

Their co-written book, “Breaking the Code” (self-published and available Friday), tells the tale of how their lives intersected, giving a no-holds-barred glimpse into the world of biker gangs and the investigators who go after them.

[ click to continue reading at TwinCities.com ]

from Publisher’s Weekly

No Lack of Major Prose Houses at Comic-Con

By Rich Shivener

From samplers and author panels to signings and galleys of science fiction and fantasy novels, major book publishers such as Penguin Random House and HarperCollins are once again investing heavily in promotional materials for the five days of Comic-Con International, held at the San Diego Convention Center. The annual pop-culture convention draws more than 130,000 attendees and offers programming related to comics, film, books and related media. Book publishers see it as an incredible promotional platform.

Comic-con may celebrate comics but the fans are on the lookout for books and related media of all kinds. Over the weekend, HarperCollins and its partners are set to preview an interactive, multimedia project based on writer James Frey’s Endgame trilogy, which chronicles teens hunting for ancient keys that could save the world. At its core, the project is an augmented reality game that allows players, using their smartphones, to scavenge for items around Comic-Con. Endgame is also getting the film treatment by 20th Century Fox. Frey, HarperCollins, Google’s Niantic Labs and 20th Century Fox collaborated on the project, and they’re planning panels, signings, access codes to games.

Comic-Con is a fitting place to launch the project because of its media convergence, says Sandee Roston, executive director of publicity of HarperCollins Children’s Books, the division that publishes the Endgame series.

“The innovative mobile game adds interactive real-world experiences to Endgame, merging story with social activation to create a fully immersive world,” Roston told PW on Friday.

[ click to continue reading at Publisher’s Weekly ]

from Publishers Weekly

BEA 2014: Big Children’s Books at BEA

By Diane Roback, Carolyn Juris, John Sellers, and Matia Burnett

Endgame by James Frey is HarperCollins’s big YA title of the show; it releases in September with a one-million-copy first printing. A Google-based game and an in-book puzzle are part of the series’ multiplatform concept, and a film is in the works. In other Frey news, The Revenge of Seven, the second-to-last title in the Lorien Legacy series, arrives in late August with a 400,000-copy first printing. Other big fall titles from Harper include the second volume in the graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book; The Guardian Herd: Starfire, first in a new series (“It’s Warriors with horses,” said publicity director Sandee Roston); The Swap by Megan Shull, a Freaky Friday–style story set in in middle school; Madeline Roux’s sequel to Asylum, titled Sanctum; Falling Into Place by Amy Zhang; and Positive, a memoir from 19-year-old first-time author Paige Rawl about her experiences with bullying while growing up with HIV.

[ click to read full article at Publisher’s Weekly ]

from The New York Times

Jim Brosnan, Who Threw Literature a Curve, Dies at 84

By BRUCE WEBER

Jim Brosnan in Chicago in 1964. “The Long Season,” his groundbreaking 1960 book, began as a diary. Credit Associated Press

Jim Brosnan, who achieved modest baseball success as a relief pitcher but gained greater fame and consequence in the game by writing about it, died on June 29 in Park Ridge, Ill. He was 84.In 1959, Brosnan, who played nine years in the major leagues, kept a diary of his experience as a pitcher, first with the St. Louis Cardinals and later, after a trade, with the Cincinnati Reds. Published the next year as “The Long Season,” it was a new kind of sportswriting — candid, shrewd and highly literate, more interested in presenting the day-to-day lives and the actual personalities of the men who played the game than in maintaining the fiction of ballplayers as all-American heroes and role models.

Written with a slightly jaundiced eye — but only slightly — the book is often given credit for changing the nature of baseball writing, anticipating the literary reporting of Roger Angell, Roger Kahn and others; setting the stage for “Veeck — as in Wreck,” the vibrant memoir of Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of several teams; and predating by a decade Jim Bouton’s more celebrated, more rambunctious (and more salacious) pitcher’s diary, “Ball Four.”

[ click to read full obit at NYTimes.com ]

from The NY Daily News

Olivia Wilde responds to GQ film critic claiming she is too hot to portray a writer: ‘Kiss my smart a–’

Olivia Wilde has a witty response for someone who claimed she couldn’t have beauty and brains.

The actress portrays a writer in the romantic thriller “Third Person,” but GQ film critic Tom Carson didn’t find her believable in the role due to her looks.

“She’s supposed to be a writer … but your belief in that won’t outlast (Olivia) Wilde scampering naked through hotel corridors,” Carson wrote in his review of the film. “With that tush, who’d need to be literate? Who’d want to?”

When Jezebel tweeted about Carson’s backhanded compliment, Wilde responded with acerbic humor.

“HA,” she tweeted Tuesday. “Kiss my smart a–, GQ.”

[ click to continue reading at NYDailyNews.com ]

from The Financial Times

Felix Dennis, the improbable magazine entrepreneur

By Matthew Engel

Felix Dennis, center, with James Anderson, left, and Richard Neville, editors of Oz, after being found guilty of corrupting public morals in 1971. (United Press International)

Felix Dennis, whose death aged 67 was announced on Monday, was one of Britain’s most successful media entrepreneurs and by a long distance the most improbable. Reaction varied from amazement that he had lived as long as he did, to shock that such a seemingly unstoppable force had allowed a mere disease to get the better of him.

John Brown, a friend and business associate, compared him to Richard Branson in his willingness to court failure and, if it happened, shrug it off. “Felix had irrepressible energy, loads of ideas and faith in his own abilities. And he just charged ahead.”

He charged ahead out of the office too. Dennis had revelled in the Sixties lifestyle: “Free sex with no downside,” he would recall. “Women were walking down the street in miniskirts, in what looked like their underwear. It was almost too much for anyone to stand.” All his life there were a lot of cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women – and drugs, including a spell as a crack addict. Some, however, thought that Dennis was inclined to overstate the quantity of drugs and sex, just a bit. He once claimed, in a newspaper interview, to have pushed a man over a cliff. And no one seemed to believe that at all.

He did find the time for a remarkably varied set of achievements. Dennis was a popular performance poet (particularly when he offered free wine from his cellar as well). He established the Heart of England Forest near his Warwickshire home, which now has more than 1m saplings. And he had a large, themed collection of bronze sculptures.

[ click to read full article at FT.com ]

from NY Times

Poetry: Who Needs It?

By WILLIAM LOGAN

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — WE live in the age of grace and the age of futility, the age of speed and the age of dullness. The way we live now is not poetic. We live prose, we breathe prose, and we drink, alas, prose. There is prose that does us no great harm, and that may even, in small doses, prove medicinal, the way snake oil cured everything by curing nothing. But to live continually in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose is to become deaf to what language can do.

The dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many, and bought by almost no one. (Is this the silent majority? Well, once the “silent majority” meant the dead.) We now have a poetry month, and a poet laureate — the latest, Charles Wright, announced just last week — and poetry plastered in buses and subway cars like advertising placards. If the subway line won’t run it, the poet can always tweet it, so long as it’s only 20 words or so. We have all these ways of throwing poetry at the crowd, but the crowd is not composed of people who particularly want to read poetry — or who, having read a little poetry, are likely to buy the latest edition of “Paradise Lost.”

This is not a disaster. Most people are also unlikely to attend the ballet, or an evening with a chamber-music quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de La Tour. Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience. Poets have always found it hard to make a living — at poetry, that is. The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money betting on the South Sea Bubble.

There are still those odd sorts, no doubt disturbed, and unsocial, and torturers of cats, who love poetry nevertheless. They come in ones or twos to the difficult monologues of Browning, or the shadowy quatrains of Emily Dickinson, or the awful but cheerful poems of Elizabeth Bishop, finding something there not in the novel or the pop song.

This is not a disaster. Most people are also unlikely to attend the ballet, or an evening with a chamber-music quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de La Tour. Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience. Poets have always found it hard to make a living — at poetry, that is. The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money betting on the South Sea Bubble.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from TIME Magazine

Maya Angelou: A Hymn to Human Endurance

Remembering a life of relentless creativity.

When Maya Angelou was 16 she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco but the first woman conductor. By the time she was 40 she had also been, in no particular order, a cook, a waitress, a madam, a prostitute, a dancer, an actress, a playwright, an editor at an English-language newspaper in Egypt, and a Calypso singer (her one album is entitled “Miss Calypso.”) It wasn’t until 1970, when she was 41, that she became an author: her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, told the story of her life up to the age of 17. That remarkable life story ended today at the age of 86.

In her last years Angelou’s work became associated with a certain easy, commercial sentimentality—she loaned her name to a line of Hallmark cards, for example—but there was nothing easy about her beginnings. She was born Marguerite Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was 3. When she was 7 her mother’s boyfriend raped her. She testified against him in court, but before he could be sentenced he was found beaten to death in an alley. Angelou’s response to the trauma was to become virtually mute – she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak in public for the next 5 years. She often cited this silent period as a time when she became intimately aware of the written word.

Angelou eventually regained her voice, but her life remained chaotic. She became a mother at 17, immediately after graduating high school. She bounced from city to city, job to job and spouse to spouse (she picked up the name Angelou from one of her husbands; “Maya” was her brother’s nickname for her). She spent years living in Egypt and then in Ghana. By the time she was 40 her life story and her distinctive, charismatic way with words had her friends—among them James Baldwin—begging her to write it all down. She finally did.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou describes herself as “a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.” Although generations of high school students have been assigned it, the book’s unsparing account of black life in the South during the Depression, and of her sexual abuse, is not easy reading. It is Angelou’s tough, funny, lyrical voice that transforms her story from a litany of isolation and suffering into a hymn of glorious human endurance. That extraordinary voice—dense, idiosyncratic, hilarious, alive—brought novelistic techniques to the task of telling a life story, and its influence on later generations of memoirists, from Maxine Hong Kingston to Elizabeth Gilbert, is incalculable. (Angelou also mixed fact and fiction, unapologetically, long before James Frey.) The themes she expounded in Caged Bird, of suffering and self-reliance, would be braided through the rest of her long life’s work. “All my work, my life, everything is about survival,” Angelou said. “All my work is meant to say, ‘You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.’ In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.”

[ click to continue reading at TIME.com ]

from The Guardian

Million dollar cover reveal for James Frey’s new Endgame series

Newsflash: Readers around the world are given the chance to win a million dollars in gold by solving the clues of a super-puzzle!

by Amber Segal

Emblazoned… Endgame: The Calling by James Frey. Photograph: HarperCollins

from Publishers Marketplace

BEA In A Book, Featuring The Best of YA!

Available for free download now for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, the Google Play Books store, and Kobo.

This inaugural edition of Buzz Books: Young Adult provides substantial pre-publication excerpts from more than 20 forthcoming young adult and middle grade books. You now have access to the newest YA voices the publishing industry is broadcasting for the fall/winter season—for free to read on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Google Play, Kobo and more.

Excerpts you can read right now include new work from established giants of the field (Ellen Hopkins; Garth Nix; Scott Westerfeld), authors best-known for their adult books (Carl Hiaasen; Michael Perry; Ben Tripp; Meg Wolitzer), and genuine newsmakers—including the first of James Frey’s attention-getting Endgame trilogy, which will include interactive elements developed in association with Google’s Niantic Labs.

[ click to continue reading at Publishers Marketplace ]

from The New York Times

Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm

By JENNIFER MEDINA

A sophomore at the university, Bailey Loverin, and others have formally called for “trigger warnings” on class syllabuses that would flag potentially traumatic subject matter. CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them. But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other schools.

The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate. Trigger warnings, they say, suggest a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to challenge, not embrace. The warnings have been widely debated in intellectual circles and largely criticized in opinion magazines, newspaper editorials and academic email lists.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from Shaq.com

Shaq to publish a children’s book series

Courtesy USA Today

Shaquille O’Neal can add a new title to his LinkedIn profile: “Children’s book author.”

The retired basketball player will author a new series of books called Little Shaq for early readers. It will be based on O’Neal’s childhood and feature a series of adventures of a young Shaq and his cousin Barry.

“I am excited to be working with Bloomsbury on this project that will reach young, independent readers,” O’Neal said in a statement. “Education is a cause that is very important to me and I love that this series will combine reading with my love of basketball. It’s a slam dunk for literacy!”

The first book is scheduled to be published in 2015.

[ click to continue reading at Shaq.com ]

from The Star Press

Way, way over the rainbow

Farley Mowat – nature lover,

It’s possible that the old Wicked Witch of the West had a point.

Debut novelist Danielle Paige fantastically flips the fantasy script on the wonderful land of Oz and its denizens in “Dorothy Must Die, the first book in a new young-adult series.

Dorothy Gale, the plucky heroine from the L. Frank Baum works and classic 1939 Judy Garland movie, is now the big heavy, and it’s another girl from Kansas who’s tapped to take out the pigtailed menace and her little dog, too.

Amy Gumm, with her pink hair and knock-off clothing, is a teenager who’s willing to do anything to get out of her trailer-park life in Flat Hill. Though armed with tons of gumption, she’s not liked at school or at home, where her single mom leaves Amy to fend for herself in an oncoming tornado.

It’s a doozy, too, and like the one that took Dorothy on a magical journey decades before, this windy disaster transports Amy to Oz.

[ click to continue reading at The Star Press ]

[ click to pick DOROTHY MUST DIE now at Amazon ]

from Quill & Quire

Beloved Canadian author Farley Mowat dead at 92

Photo by Fred Phipps

Farley Mowat – nature lover, gadfly, and author of the Canadian classics Never Cry Wolf and Lost in the Barrens – has died at the age of 92.

The iconic Canadian author of novels, memoirs, non-fiction books, and books for children, was born in Belleville, Ontario, in 1921 (his father claimed he was conceived in a canoe). He enlisted in the army during the Second World War and was sent overseas, where he fought in the bloody and extended Italian campaign that cost many Canadian soldiers their lives. According to Sandra Martin’s obituary in The Globe and Mail, it was in Ortona that Mowat started drafting the manuscripts that would become the canonical children’s tales The Dog That Wouldn’t Be and Owls in the Family.

Beloved for his children’s writing and his passion for environmental causes, Mowat’s career was not without controversy. Particularly damaging to the author’s reputation was a 1996 cover article in Saturday Night magazine that claimed Mowat had exaggerated or outright falsified facts and other information in his first book, People of the Deer, set among the Inuit of the Arctic. The author of the article, John Goddard, also claimed infelicities in The Desperate People, the sequel to People of the Deer, and Mowat’s classic memoir, Never Cry Wolf. Years before James Frey was excoriated on Oprah’s couch, Mowat found himself forced to defend his approach to what is now known as “creative non-fiction,” saying he preferred truth to facts and that he wrote in a grey area between the two.

Perhaps Mowat’s most memorable defence of his practice occurred onstage at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in 1999. When interviewer Peter Gzowski asked about his fidelity to facts in his writing, Mowat exploded, “FUCK the facts!”

Of his own writing, Mowat was self-effacing. “I’m a simple man,” he told Q&Qin 2008. “I loathe all talk of ‘artistry’ in writing.

[ click to read full obit at Quill & Quire ]

from The Huffington Post

The Dark Side of the Rainbow: 9 Good Guys Gone Very, Very Bad

by Danielle Page – Author, ‘Dorothy Must Die’

When I told people I had written a book in which Dorothy Gale of Kansas was the villain, almost everyone had the same response: “Uh, what?”

The Dorothy of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books is the Little Miss Perfect of children’s literature. She’s got a sweet, wide-eyed innocence and an ever-optimistic outlook on life. She sees the good in everyone and tries to treat others as she’d like to be treated. Dorothy’s got her values in order too: this is the girl who could have been princess of her own personal fairyland, but decided to go back to Kansas instead–because she missed her family.

In the popular imagination, Dorothy Gale is about as Good as it gets. In my book, Dorothy Must Die (HarperCollins, $17.99), she’s a vain, evil dictator who needs to be taken out before she destroys Oz.

Where do I get off messing with Dorothy like this? Look, just hear me out.

I like Dorothy, I promise! One thing I love about Baum’s character is that, for all her sweetness, she’s no Pollyanna. She has a no-nonsense, Midwestern toughness about her that makes her easy to admire. She’s a nice girl, sure, but she’s not a doormat. Mess with her, and she just might melt you. (By accident, of course.)

[ click to continue reading at The Huffington Post ]

from The Washington Post

Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say

By Michael S. Rosenwald

Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to.

“I give it a few seconds — not even minutes — and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.

“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”

To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.

“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”

[ click to continue reading at The Washington Post ]

from USA Today

Exclusive trailer: Preview the book ‘Dorothy Must Die’

Whitney Matheson, USA TODAY

Beneath that sweet exterior, Dorothy Gale is a cold, hard witch.

That’s the idea behind a new young-adult book, anyway — and I think it’s one that might prompt teens (and their parents) to take another plunge into the land of Oz.

In her dark new novel, Dorothy Must Die, Danielle Paige re-imagines the fantasy landscape we grew up with. Her world paints the Scarecrow as a character who “conducts inhumane experiments on winged monkeys,” the Tin Man as a trained killer, the Cowardly Lion as a “monster out for blood” and Dorothy as a power-hungry woman who must be stopped.

Today I’m debuting the trailer for the book, which goes on sale next week. Intrigued? A whopping 12 free chapters have been posted on Epic Reads. For $1.99 you also can grab No Place Like Oz, Paige’s prequel e-book.

[ click to continue reading at USAToday.com ]

from BuzzFeed

9 Video Games Based On Classic Literature

by Kevin Smokler

2. Fahrenheit 451 (1984)

Via en.wikipedia.org

Mostly text and a few graphics, and set five years after the novel concludes, protagonist Guy Montag is now an agent for the Literary Underground, whose sentries speak to one another in quotes from great books. His mission: break into the New York Public Library where illegal books have been transferred to micro cassette (Hey, it was 1984!) and upload them to the Undergrounds’ Information Network.

Ray Bradbury collaborated with the game’s designers on the script. Carisse McClellan is back as Montag’s partner in crime. There’s also a super intelligent computer named (what else?) RAY.

Enemies: Fireman, 451 Patrols, Electric Hounds.

Weaponry: A lighter called “The Flame of Knowledge.”

Can I Play It? You can download it here, then find a Commodore 64 or make your computer impersonate one.

[ click to read more at BuzzFeed.com ]

from The Sierra Vista Herald

from MTV

‘Dorothy Must Die’ Will Change How You Feel About Oz — Get A Sneak Peek Now

Read three chapters of the upcoming YA book now.

By Brenna Ehrlich

Was the Wicked Witch of the West really that bad, or did she just get a bad rap? Was Dorothy really just a sweet-faced girl from Kansas, or a ruthless dictator? YA author Danielle Paige tackles those questions and more in her upcoming novel, “Dorothy Must Die,” a Oz revival story that makes “Return To Oz” look like a Disney-fied dream.

MTV News is exclusively premiering chapters four through six of the novel today. You can check out chapters one to three on Epic Reads, and the next couple excerpts later this week on Just Jared Jr and Hypable.

“Dorothy Must Die” — which comes just in time for the 75th anniversary of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” — tells the tale of trailer park resident Amy Gumm, who gets swept away from her dreary life during, you guessed it, a tornado.

Landing in the familiar — albeit fictional — land of Oz, Gumm is surprised to find that it’s not all gumdrops and friendly (and cowardly) lions. Dorothy, along with Glinda, has grown mad with power, and it’s up to Gumm, and The Revolutionary Order of the Wicked, to bring Oz back to its former glory. Oh, yeah, and to off the pig-tailed one once and for all.

“Dorothy Must Die” will hit shelves on April 1 — and the CW soon enough — but you can check out a good chunk below right now-abouts. Read up!

[ click to read “Dorothy Must Die” now ]

from VISUAL NEWS

A Very Rare Book Opens 6 Different Ways, Reveals 6 Different Books

Book binding has seen many variations, from the iconic Penguin paperbacks to highly unusual examples like this from late 16th century Germany. It’s a variation on the dos-à-dos binding format (from the French meaning “back-to-back”). Here however, the book opens six different directions, each way revealing a different book. It seems that everyone has a tablet or a Kindle tucked away in their bag (even my 90 year old grandma), and so it sometimes comes as a surprise to remember the craftsmanship that once went along with reading.

SEE ALSO HOME SWEET TOME: A HOUSE CUT INTO A BOOK

The book, which comes from the Rogge Library in Strängnäs, features devotional texts printed in Germany during the 1550s and 1570s (including Martin Luther’s Der kleine Catechismus). Each of the books is held closed with its own ornate metal clasp, and was probably far more decorative than useful. Just imagine finding where you left off! See more images of this book and other rare examples on the National Library of Sweden’s Flickr page.

[ click to continue reading at VisualNews.com ]