Posts tagged with satire

Oct 30 2017

Weekly Book Giveaway: Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero

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This week's Book Giveaway is Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids, which has a great cover and an even greater hook: it's being sold as a subverted, grown-up version of works like Scooby-Do, The Hardy Boys, and Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" series. I have no idea how well that combination will actually work, but it sounds like my idea of note-perfect Halloween reading. A full review will follow shortly...

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May 8 2017

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan

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You know that bit in celebrity magazine interviews where they list in painstaking detail the outfit the actress is wearing? Or describe her utterly fabulous house? Well, picture an entire book composed of those paragraphs, and you'd be covering at least 75% of the plot of Kevin Kwan's 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians...

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May 8 2017

Weekly Book Giveaway: Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan

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This week's Book Giveaway is Kevin Kwan's 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians, the book that inspired the currently-filming movie of the same name. I'm fascinated by the casting process for this film (which has been full of drama), so I thought I'd better read the book. Our review will follow shortly...

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Apr 20 2017

That poster's pretty great, tho.

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So, there's a movie coming out called The Little Hours, based loosely on a story from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, a 14th century collection of novellas. The movie (which stars about a million relatively big-name comic actors) is about a young man who gets a job as a gardener in a convent...

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Apr 19 2017

Good for the soul

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According to The Hollywood Reporter, the "Midnight Confessions" segment from CBS' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is going to be made into a book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster...

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Apr 4 2017

Close to home

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McSweeney's just posted the following list: National Geographic Articles in the Year 2030". It would be so much funnier if at least a handful of them ("95 Degrees Fahrenheit in December — Is This the Coldest Winter in Years?" and...

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May 17 2016

Off-brand

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The trailer is out for Ang Lee's upcoming film adaptation of Ben Fountain's debut novel, 2012's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. I haven't read Billy Lynn, but I keep seeing it described as "razor-sharp satire". I can only say that that is really not the vibe I'm getting from this trailer...

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Jul 21 2015

Spot on

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Mallory Ortberg's literary tributes over at The Toast are always a pleasure to read, but I was particularly excited about her latest effort, "The Sequel To Rebecca The Second Mrs. de Winter Deserves"...

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Jun 13 2013

A different take on The Great Gatsby

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I'm getting a weird thrill out of reading this "alternate history" of The Great Gatsby, written by Robert Atwan for The Believer magazine. The story is told from the perspective of Tom Buchanan, and Atwan gets his voice exactly right...

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Jun 12 2013

I treasure these.

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Behold these "honest" re-worked posters for Disney's fairytale movies, found on TheFW.com. The photoshopping could use some work, but the results are glorious. I'd hang both the Beauty and the Beast one and the Little Mermaid one on my wall*...

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May 22 2013

Hee. (Also, gross.)

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Tréy Sager’s ebook Fires of Siberia is apparently a real—and mind-blowing—thing*: an "old-fashioned bodice ripper romance" inspired by the life of Tea Party leader and Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Here's the official plot summary...

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Sep 20 2012

So many puns

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Another day, another Fifty Shades of Grey parody–this one's a poultry-focused cookbook from "an established food industry professional". And yet another cover artist who put in the effort to far outstrip whoever designed the original series...

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Aug 9 2012

Infinite shades of embarrassing

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How sad: some graphic artist clearly devoted way more effort to the cover art for this parody of Fifty Shades of Grey than the original designer(s) put into all three of the actual books...

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Jul 19 2012

That is some low-budget cover art, too.

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According to E!Online, some e-book company called Clandestine Classics has taken a bunch of classic novels and sexed 'em up. The article name-drops the Brontes, Austen, Melville, and Conan Doyle as potential subjects (victims?)...

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Jan 3 2012

The sincerest form of flattery

The company that represents the Diary of a Wimpy Kid brand recently won a temporary restraining order against the publisher of two Wimpy Kid-parodying graphic novels: the "Wimpy Zombie" series by ...

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Dec 19 2011

Rating downgrade

According the Horn Book Blog, Akashic Books is releasing a G-rated version of their best-selling humor book Go the [Expletive] to Sleep entitled Seriously, Just Go to Sleep. This confuses me. My...

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Feb 10 2011

Oddness

Check out the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator, yet another testament to the total (and sometimes glorious) randomness of the Internet.The North Korean one's my favorite, but this one's good, too:

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Sep 9 2010

Witch-hunting for fun and profit

Cinematical is linking Noomi Rapace (who played Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) to an upcoming American project called Hansel and Gretel: Witch ...

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Aug 31 2010

Sage advice for the young'uns

Ah, satirical advice from Disney's cartoon princesses! Check out these words of wisdom from "Belle" and "Ariel":To be fair, I feel like cherry-picking objectionable messages from Disney films is ...

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Jul 27 2010

Jane Austen's Fight Club

I'm no fan of the endless Jane Austen book parodies currently glutting up the market, but this... I have to admit it, I cracked up.

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Jul 21 2010

Behind the times

How did I miss this? The 2010 Bulwer-Lytton contest results were released late last month, and this year's winner is (as they always are) a delight:For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's a...

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Jul 14 2010

I want one.

Sadly, this Epic Win FTW submission isn't a real book:But on the up side, one of the comments informs me that this is, and doesn't that almost make up for it?

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Jul 8 2010

Pride and Prejudice and cell phone apps

AustenBlog has posted a generally-positive guest review by some dude named Douglas R. Burchill of the new Pride and Prejudice and Zombies video game for the iPhone. If you're looking for the shor...

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May 10 2010

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: the Graphic Novel, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

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To misquote Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that an unexpectedly successful book will force its creators to keep milking it like a cash cow until it falls over dead. That's wh...

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Mar 22 2010

Well, *I* would watch it.

This reminds me of all those [classic novel] v. the monster books, only way more fun. Because unlike Jane Austen Beats Down the Werewolves (or whatever they're publishing next), Twilight would ac...

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Mar 16 2010

Booooring.

The website Popcandy (no relation) is currently featuring a sneak peek of the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, due out May 4th. It all looks very "Barbie vs. ...

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Mar 10 2010

Time on your hands?

Whoa. This must have taken some serious effort:And in other news, Disney has decided to go for a more dude-friendly take on the ol' fairytale genre: from here on out (says the Los Angeles Times),...

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Dec 14 2009

Double ugh.

Man, not only are they making a movie version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it's going to star (and be produced by) Natalie Portman, an actress I have always found hugely overrated*. I don't...

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Sep 16 2009

Mutating Austen: a how-to guide

Slate is currently featuring an essay called "How I wrote Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters", by Quirk Books author Ben H. Winters. I'm still not paying to read his book, but I have to give t...

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Jul 29 2009

Laughing it up in the Middle East

Charlize Theron has acquired the screen rights to Christopher Buckley's satirical novel Florence of Arabia, which is apparently about "a State Dept. employee (to be played by Theron) who, after wa...

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