Source: usatoday

Author Seth Grahame-Smith launched a phenomenon with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, his clever twist on the Jane Austen classic. (Grahame-Smith’s follow-up, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, was released this month.)

The success of Zombies has been so huge that a film adaptation is in the works. In May, Del Rey takes the franchise a step further with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel.

Read more here…

This would make for an amazing graphic novel. I will be putting this on my must get list.  I am also looking forward to reading Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Are you a fan of these books? Which have you read? Tell us about your thoughts on the novel. Leave a comment.

Source: bleedingcool

Yesterday, Amazon stopped selling directly almost all graphic novel distributed by Diamond Book Distributors, on the back of a price glitches expectations raised and dashed simultaneously.

This included books published by Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, IDW, Avatar and Dynamite.

Diamond sources inform me that they believe this is a precautionary measure on Amazon’s part, while they dealt with fallout issues over the glitch, rather than explained by any conspiratorial reasons.

This didn’t stop a number of publishers making their displeasure known to the distributor, but it seems to have come as much of a surprise to Diamond as it did to the publishers in question.

Read more here…

Well thank goodness it seems they will sort it all out. At first glance I thought they meant indefinitely and that would NOT be good. Where do you purchase your comics from? I think I will have to start buying them online, because the last time I went to a major outlet (which I won’t name) the selection was pitiful and only one major comic book and graphic novel distributor’s titles were available. What gives? I was so disappointed.

Speaking of comic books…have you checked out OBS’s 3-Panel Horror Comic Contest? Check it out and enter today.

S.E.G.O. — Science Fiction You Should Be Reading

by Devilstower at Daily Kos

There’s an old saying about the golden age of science fiction — it’s twelve. That is, twelve is the age where readers seem most willing to take the Door into Summer, to try and visualize a tesseract, to boldly split infinitives like no one has split them before. Not too long after that, even those who continue to read fiction not handed to them by a teacher find that they’re no longer able or willing to follow along on a trip at a galactic scale.

Even on the bookshelves some of the works regarded as science fiction’s best had a hard time finding a general audience, not only because of a bad media image, but because they seemed to be written to an audience more interested in the nuts and bolts than the people on the other end of the wrench. I suspect that many of the people who were hard SF fans in the 1970s turned to Clancyesque military fare in the 1980s, a place where they could satisfy their thirst to know the serial number on the bottom of the gadgets that were at the center of the plots.

Read More here

THE WAR OF THE DWARVES

Anna Gregson at Orbit

Translated from the original German by the very talented Sally-Ann Spencer, this is the eagerly anticipated sequel to The Dwarves (UK/ US/ ANZ), described by SFRevu as: ‘The kind of solid fantasy that the market thrives upon’, and by The Bookbag as ‘A fabulous addition to the fantasy genre’.

The War of the Dwarves, from international bestseller Markus Heitz, will be released this month.

Read More, plus an extract here

Neil Gaiman: Ghost Writer

Serena Altschul at CBS News

“What do you think your attraction to the dark side of things is?” Altschul asked.

“I think the thing that crystallized it for me, the moment that I actually understood it for myself, was a quote from Ogden Nash, the great American poet and humorist, where he said, ‘Where there’s a monster, there’s a miracle.’

“And I realized that that, for me, is the joy of the monstrous. It’s the joy of ghosts, fiction, joy of vampires. It’s the miraculous.”

The monstrous and the miraculous have been kind to Neil Gaiman. He’s sold millions of novels, comics and kids’ books, from “Sandman” to Batman to Coraline. None other than horror master Stephen King has called him a “treasure trove of story.”

Read More here

Schools’ Nonfiction Problem (True Story)

By Tom Kuntz at the New York Times

The “Harry Potter” phenomenon brought parental sighs of relief over a revival of reading among the young (perhaps overly optimistic sighs). And the revival has morphed lately into the wild popularity of the “Twilight” series of hormonally charged teenage vampire novels.

But on his Washington Post blog Class Struggle, Jay Mathews, a veteran education writer, highlights longstanding concerns among some educators that youthful reading is weighted too much toward fiction — a view seconded on other blogs.

Mr. Mathews explains why nonfiction books get short shrift in schools and draws on the educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. to argue why they shouldn’t:

Educators say nonfiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read nonfiction, and they can’t read nonfiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.

Read More here

Read the First Chapter of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

via io9

Seth Grahame-Smith, whose debut novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies became an overnight sensation and New York Times-bestseller in 2009, stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.

Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true-life story of our greatest president for the first time—all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.

Read the first chapter here

“Blameless”, or “How To Design A Cover in 1:55 seconds”

Lauren Panepinto at Orbit

As you guys know, your friendly neighborhood Creative Director has been slaving away at the Fall 2010/Winter 2011 Orbit covers (yes, we work that far in advance) and now that the covers are (mostly) done I’ve started to launch them on the blog for your viewing pleasure, and general online critique. Well, I have a special treat above for devoted Orbit fans, cover design aficionados, and especially admirers of Ms. Alexia Tarabotti, heroine of Soulless. Timed to celebrate this month’s release of Changeless, Alexia Tarabotti’s second adventure, I have a special Making of the Cover Video for the next book, due out in September 2010, Blameless.

Over 6 hours of my onscreen compositing, retouching, color correction, type obsessing, all condensed down to a slim sexy one minute 55 seconds of cover design. Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time…

Read More here

I love seeing behind the scenes stuff for making books. It’s a pretty cool video. And I like the series too. And I wish we had read more non-fiction in school, I read a lot of it now. I think they’re much more interesting than the texts books, and if you pick the right one they can give you the basic info that you’d get from textbooks, but in a much more interesting manner. And I hate when people say that they need to make it easier for kids in high school. My high school curriculum didn’t prepare me for college in the slightest (except my senior English class). Teenagers are smart-stop dumbing stuff down for them.I know part of the problem is some people don’t like to read, and novels are more likely to get them hooked, but once you get to high school there should be a mix.

What did you think of the Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter excerpt? Do you read Neil Gaiman’s books? What about Soulless?

Source: citypaper

WHEN BOOKS COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE: WHY WHAT WE READ AT 12 MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT READING WE DO

Emily Flake

A girl I once caught reading Fahrenheit 451 over my shoulder on the subway confessed: “You know, I’m an English lit major, but I’ve never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old.” I fell slightly in love with her when she said that. It was so frank and uncool, and undeniably true.

Let’s all admit it: We never got over those first loves. Listen to the difference in the voices of any groups of well-read, overeducated people discussing contemporary fiction, or the greatest books they’ve ever read, and the voices of those same people, only two drinks later, talking about the books they loved as kids. The Betsy Tacy Books! I loved those books! The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet! I can’t believe you know that! The Little House on the Prairie books! Oh, my God–did you read The Long Winter? So good. Hey–does anyone else remember The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree?

Read more here…

After reading this article I have to say my sentiments are similar. Growing up, there were many books that changed my perspective about the world, that touched serious issues and allowed me to grow by reading them. One in particular, Animal Farm, the book that I had to write three book reports on, three years in a row. By the time the third year came around I never wanted to see the book again, but because i ’studied’ it so much, it remains till this day, one of my favorite world-altering books. Lord of the Flies is another that comes to mind. It tops my list as an all time favorite. Who can forget coming of age novels by Judy Blume, or science fiction novels like Ray Bradbury’s A Martian Chronicles that really made you think about society. What do young readers have today that they consider the best books they’ve ever read? The Twilight Series? Sure it a fun read, but what does it really teach you? How will it affect it’s readers? Being in love is an obsessive journey filled with possessiveness and danger?  How do you feel about all this? Tell us your thoughts.

By Kerry Skemp at the Bostonist

An Evening with Seth Grahame-Smith
Brattle Theatre (40 Brattle Street, Cambridge)
Monday, March 8
6 to 8 pm
$5 tickets from the Harvard Coop

Much as Somerville is the birthplace of the Monster Mash, Seth Grahame-Smith is the pioneer of the Monster Movement in literature. Though the idea of blending monsters and literary classics was first conceived by Jason Rekulak of Quirk Books, Rekulak chose Grahame-Smith to pen the wildly popular Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Zombie revolution aside, Grahame-Smith is actually at the Brattle to talk about his latest book: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. This psudeobiography paints Lincoln as a battler of the undead in addition to slavery. Not surprisingly, a movie version (by Tim Burton) is already in the works. Horror films inspiring books inspiring books inspiring films: what a delightfully disturbing progression.

Read More here

Will you be going to see him talk? Are you looking forward to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?