Bargain hunters take heed
Barnes and Noble currently has a lovely boxed set of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell available for $3.99. The book has been broken down into three volumes (each bound in a diffe...
Hypnotizing...
I've recently started watching the anime version of the bread-baking shounen manga Yakitate!! Japan. The series is pretty good (although some of the jokes feel a little overstretched to me), but ...
The licensing opportunities alone boggle the mind.
Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios have acquired the film rights to The 39 Clues, a mystery series/online game that Scholastic Books is debuting in September.The 39 Clues is a planned 10-book s...
Man convicted of killing 'Curious George' co-author
A jury convicted Vincent Puglisi on Tuesday of killing Alan Shalleck, the writer and director of dozens of short episodes of the Disney TV show Curious George and co-writer (with original creator ...
Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul, by Karen Abbot
Karen Abbot’s nonfiction book Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul is the story of the Everleigh Club, an infamous brothel that became a...
Which to choose?
After what feels like months of nothing watchable coming out in video stores, there are two very different Wordcandy-approved film adaptations out on DVD today: The Spiderwick Chronicles and Perse...
Children's Book Illustrator Tasha Tudor dies at 92
The New York Times has an obituary up for Tasha Tudor, a well-known children's book illustrator who died last Wednesday at age 92. Tudor was a famously colorful character who chose to live as tho...
Lovehampton, by Sherri Rifkin
Sherri Rifkin’s debut novel Lovehampton is a rare beast: a non-irritating book about a thirtysomething professional woman in New York*. As the story opens, TV producer Tori Miller has just signed...
Hot Mess: Summer in the City, by Julie Kraut and Shallon Lester
In honor of the first Monday of summer, we’re devoting today’s posts to beach reads. Sure, it might be cloudy where you are, or raining, or hotter than the ninth circle of Hell, but any one of the...
Oooh... maybe he was an alien?
Or Bat Boy!Yes, dear readers, The Sun has taken a break from investigating UFOs and Elvis sightings in order to definitively establish the origins of Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy.
Thank you, anime gods!
Remember how I was hoping for a Skip Beat! anime? Well, I whined, and the anime gods delivered. According to Anime News Network, an anime version of Yoshiki Nakamura's story will be coming out t...
The Eyes of a King, by Catherine Banner
The publishers of Catherine Banner’s The Eyes of a King have talked a lot about the fact that its author was only 14 when she started writing her book. Unlike the books of fellow wunderkinder Chri...
Terry Pratchett continues to be 100% awesome.
The English bookseller Waterstones has posted a lovely interview with Terry Pratchett on their website. The article was written by Neil Gaiman (who co-authored Good Omens with Pratchett) and feat...
Genius Squad: the non-movie
Check this out--it's a video trailer for our current featured book, Catherine Jinks's Genius Squad:No Australian accents, and some seriously implausible hair, but--all things considered--this trai...
Rowling justifies several Harvard tuition payments
NPR has an article up about J.K. Rowling's recent commencement address for Harvard graduates. According to report, everything went extremely well--Rowling was funny, the graduates were touched, a...
Out of Picture: Vol. 1 & 2, by Assorted Authors
In 2006, a French publisher released the first edition of Out of Picture, a graphic novel anthology of 11 short stories written and illustrated by a group of animators from Blue Sky Studios. The A...
The Middleman
I don't have cable, and even if I DID have cable, I probably wouldn't be watching ABC Family... but now I might have to start. In addition to those upcoming Meg Cabot adaptations*, ABC Family's a...
Updates all over the place
If you're a fan of the two scanlated series we host, we are happy to inform you that we just posted new chapters of both Banhonsa and Absolute Witch on our Scanlations page. And if you're not fol...
Even more Heyer info!
Sourcebooks has announced that they're planning to release several of Georgette Heyer's mysteries next spring, starting with Behold, Here's Poison, Why Shoot a Butler?, and The Unfinished Clue. A...
And in other movie news...
Spike Jonze is really, truly, absolutely making a movie of Where the Wild Things Are. No, I can’t imagine it either, but MTV has pictures, so it must be true. The CW is NOT doing a Gossip Girl s...
Brendan Fraser: still out there.
Somehow I missed the fact that Brendan Fraser is going to be starring in the adaption of Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. I really thought we'd seen the end of his career af...
Genius Squad, by Catherine Jinks
I really enjoyed Catherine Jinks’s novel Evil Genius, but its little-kid-friendly cover art and gimmicky opening failed to prepare me for the story that followed—it was tough to recover from the shock of finding such hardcore creepiness in a book with a cover that looked like a Saturday morning cartoon..
If you'd be so kind...?
I keep hearing that NPR commentator and librarian-at-large Nancy Pearl is going to be featuring Georgette Heyer's novel An Infamous Army: A Novel of Wellington, Waterloo, Love and War on her highl...
Johanna Spyri turns 181
The NPR feature The Writer's Almanac informs me that today is Heidi author Johanna Spyri's birthday.I haven't read Heidi in 15 years, but it's been lurking around in the background of my mind late...
The Prince of Midnight, Seize the Fire, and Midsummer Moon, by Laura Kinsale
If you like your romance novels high on action, low on plausibility, and full of darkly tormented heroes and heroines, check out Laura Kinsale’s books: they’re imaginative, they’re well-written, and every one of ‘em features a full soap opera’s worth of hardcore drama...
Laura Kinsale 2.0
The fine people at Sourcebooks will soon be releasing three reprints of Laura Kinsale's historical romances from the '80s and '90s. Kinsale has only written one new book in the past decade (2004's...
Twilight fans take heed!
The Twilight preview is out, and Edward's hair is magnificent:Aw, man... this looks so bad, and I know I'm going to see it. (I always do--I went to see Blood and Chocolate on opening night, and i...
His Cunning or Hers
The Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) has a wonderful new section of their website—an area dedicated to works published for their Annual General Meetings (AGM). These pieces are the cr...