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.

Magic of childhood returns to captivate

By James D. Watts Jr. at Tulsa World
A good story about young heroes and heroines dealing with fantastic creatures is a timeless thing.

To prove it, Random House has re-launched the Looking Glass Library, beginning with four classic stories of fantasy and adventure for young readers.

The original Looking Glass Library first appeared in the 1960s and included novels such as H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.”

The four books which make up the initial release of the new Looking Glass Library are “Twilight Land” by Howard Pyle, “The Princess and the Goblin” by George MacDonald and two volumes by E. Nesbit: “The Book of Dragons” and “Five Children and It.”

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Where do vampires come from?

By Ford Cochran for Nat Geo News Watch
Long-time National Geographic staff historian Mark Jenkins’ new book, Vampire Forensics, is the basis for a new National Geographic Explorer television special premiering in the U.S. Tuesday night at 10 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. It’s not quite an interview with the vampire, but Jenkins shares some of what he learned on the trail of Dracula and his kin.

Where did the belief in vampires originate?

Fear of the walking dead is old. Sucking blood isn’t always part of it–sometimes they eat you, sometimes they just beat you up. There’s some sort of deep layer of belief that crops up here and there, possibly something shared once in the Indo-European past that survived when the tribes became separate nations.

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Beyond “Harry Potter”: 5 interesting tales of plagiarism

By Marjorie Kehe
Last week, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling was named as a defendant in a lawsuit in a London court. It’s not the first time that Rowling has faced such charges. This time, the estate of author Adrian Jacobs claims that key concepts appearing in her book “Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire” were lifted from Jacobs’s 1987 book “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard.” Rowling calls the charges absurd; the Jacobs estate, instead, says the suit is “a billion-dollar case.”

Rowling is hardly the first well-known writer to face plagiarism charges. The results of such charges tend to vary widely. Some end up dismissed as without merit, others ruin careers, and yet others seem simply to disappear.

Charges that Dan Brown largely copied “The Da Vinci Code” from an earlier novel. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of the 1987 “The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail,” charged that Brown stole some basic elements of the plot of their book for his 2003 blockbuster “The Da Vinci Code”. Baigent and Leigh lost their 2006 caseagainst Random House – Brown’s publisher – in a London court and then were defeated again on appeal. The two were also forced to pay the bulk of Random House’s legal costs. The trial did, however, put “The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail” on bestseller lists.

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New Novel: “X-Men Meets Blade Runner”

By Charlie Jane Anders at io9
We see tons of novels about dystopian futures, but any novel that features enslaved mutants in a dystopian future automatically gets onto our to-read list. According to Publisher’s Marketplace, the duology Pandora’s Box and Icarus’ Wings by K.M. Ruiz just got a book deal with Thomas Dunne Books.

The duology is “pitched as “Blade Runner meets X-Men,” about a “Psion” with the ability to channel electricity, and her fight to survive a post-apocalyptic world government.

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The artwork on the new Random House books looks really cool. And I’m excited about the Vampire Forensics, it looks so interesting. And those K.M. Ruiz books look good.

What do you think of our book news today?

For Love Of Do-Good Vampires: A Bloody Book List

by Margot Adler at NPR

Even here at NPR, if you look at the archives, there have been at least 20 recent stories about vampires. What is it about our society now — the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times — that’s making vampires so popular? And why are most of the vampires we are seeing struggling to be moral?

A confession: In the past nine months, I’ve read 75 vampire novels. I’ll get to why later, but let’s first step back in history.

Kimberly Pauley has written an incredibly funny vampire book for teens that turns the genre on its head; it’s called Sucks to be Me. She believes vampires are attractive right now because we’re in a time somewhat similar to the Depression, another “time of chaos,” she says.

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Gorgeous New Covers For Jules Verne’s Classics

By Cyriaque Lamar at io9

Illustrator Jim Tierney has designed a series of interactive covers for Jules Verne’s most cherished novels. Wave-shaped dust jackets for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Pop-up spaceships for From the Earth to the Moon? Yes, please.

For his senior project, University of the Arts student Jim Tierney reimagined the covers of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey To The Center of The Earth, and Around The World in 80 Days.

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Android Karenina Book Cover Mixes C-3PO And Sex

by Meredith Woerner at io9

Quirk Classics, the makers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies have released their next cover for the cyborg inspired Android Karenina. The retold classic by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters, will be in stores June 8, 2010.

Just like the original Anna Karenina, the mash-up version will follow the relationships of Anna and Vronsky, and Levin and Kitty, but rather than 19th-century Russia, these characters live “in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automata, and rudimentary mechanical devices”. “When these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology – and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen”

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Fantasy Matters

Dr. Kirtland C Peterson at Tor

Not long ago I devoured Ursula K. Le Guin’s Cheek By Jowl: Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters. In keeping with The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy & Science Fiction and Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, it is a treasure trove of insight about fantasy, fiction, the craft of writing, and those neglected, spurned, interior worlds of the right brain.

As I was putting fingers to keyboard, a thought became a voice became an inner figure who demanded she be heard. While inclined to ignore this inner figure—a small frog, a juvenile Rhacophorus nigropalmatus I believe—her words carried weight and could not so easily be sloughed off. She asked:

“What about the left brain? Does fantasy matter to the human analytical biocomputer?”

“Fiction, stories, work like case-based reasoning in AI…”

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That’s an amazing list of vampire novels! I’ve read a few, but they are even more that sound interesting. I’ll probably use the list to help me pick books now. And I love the Jules Verne covers, I may have to get a copy of From the Earth to the Moon. And I’m so excited for Android Karenina! I love steampunk, and I haven’t read Anna Karenina, so it’ll be brand new. And it’s very cool to see a biological reason for why people read and make up stories.

What did you think of today’s book news? What was your favorite article?

Source: DailyVanguard

Imagine a combination of Twilight, Queen of the Damned and an episode of CSI, and you might get the gist of the Maker’s Song book series. This Twilight-on-steroids story features a vampire who can resist the urge to kill long enough to have sex with a human and, as a rock star, has enough charm to seduce a human FBI agent who is investigating him for a series of murders.

Adrian Phoenix, who writes mostly dark fantasy stories, began working on the Maker’s Song series in 2005. Phoenix was sure that A Rush of Wings, the first book in the series, wouldn’t be the only book featuring this cast of characters.

“I knew when I started the book that one book wouldn’t be enough to tell Dante’s story,” Phoenix said. 

Read more here…

Hmm…sounds a bit familiar  (i.e.  Queen of the Damned movie storyline with Stuart Townsend and Marquerite Moreau.) Let’s hope if they do turn ‘A Rush of Wings’ into a movie, as the author suggests it might, that they learn from the mistakes of ‘Queen of the Damned’.

Have you read this book? How do you think it would fair as a movie?

New Evernight Book: Hourglass preview

Love the Evernight series? The third book, Hourglass, comes out March 9th, but you can read the first 15 pages right now.

Here’s the summary from Claudia Gray’s site: “After escaping from Evernight Academy, the vampire boarding school where they met, Bianca and Lucas seek refuge with Black Cross, an elite group of vampire hunters. Bianca must hide her supernatural heritage or risk certain death at their hands. But when Black Cross captures her friend–the vampire Balthazar–all her secrets threaten to come out.

Soon, Bianca and Lucas have orchestrated Balthazar’s escape and are on the run, pursued not only by Black Cross, but by the powerful leaders of Evernight. Yet no matter how far they run, Bianca can’t escape her destiny.”

Get the Preview here

via David Hayles at Times Online: Spotlight: Doomed Earth book adaptations

In John Hillcoat’s The Road, based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, a man (played by Viggo Mortensen) and his son wander an America ravaged by an unknown disaster. It’s not the first time that a sci-fi novel has been used as a basis for a bleak movie meditation on Man’s possible fate.

No Blade of Grass (1970) A disappointing adaptation of John Christopher’s superb novel The Death of Grass, a story in which the world is in ruin after a virus wipes out all vegetation. Like John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, it takes place in a beleaguered Great Britain. The film starred Nigel Davenport as a man hoping to find a safe haven in Scotland.

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from Uncle Creepy at Dread Central: More Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Coming in March

Are you a fan of the really unique undead spin put on the Jane Austen literary masterpiece via Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? If so, then get ready for some really good news to kick off the new year!

Quirk Books, the publisher of the recent cult classic tale of 19th Century living dead, is getting set to release another installment in the series entitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls.

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from Visions of Paradise: Fantasy vs. Science Fiction

I read a headline recently that declared science fiction is dying, being replaced by fantasy. This spurred several thoughts in my overactive brain. It is undoubtedly true that fantasy dominates the genre these days. Locus reports in their November issue that as of September, 2009 there have been 242 sf novels published this year but 259 fantasy and 145 horror novels. That is a wide differential, which raises the obvious question: what does fantasy offer to its readers than science fiction does not?

Another possibility is that the best science fiction is thought-provoking as it speculates on the historical and sociological processes which created the future being explored. Its sense of wonder is largely intellectual rather than purely emotional. Fantasy has little of that depth, instead concentrating on creating characters whom the reader can identify with, then staying with those characters for several volumes. So where science fiction often has a feeling of disjoint, forcing the reader to adapt to a strange new world with a strange foundation in each individual novel, fantasy offers a comfortable familiarity which is something many readers crave in trouble times.

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By Fiona Purdon at the Herald Sun: Vampire thrillers boost book sales

Sales in the Young Adult fiction category have doubled annually in the past two years in Australia, figures by researcher Nielsen show.

Not surprisingly, US author Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, after the romance between vampire Edward and high-school student Bella, have been the books most responsible for creating teenagers’ reading hunger.

The YA market is aimed at teenagers but also attracts adults. Other top-selling blood-sucking series such as Vampire Academy and the Vampire Diaries are selling and trilogies including the City of Glass and Hunger Games are popular.

Fantasy YA books, such as Graceling, have also struck gold with teenagers.

Scholastic head of publishing Andrew Berkhut is not surprised by the sales surge, saying the age group has been overlooked.

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From Liviu at Fantasy Book Critic: Random House Offers Two Popular Books Free on Their Suvudu Site

Random House official sff site Suvudu has always cool features and some great content; the best one is the Free Library section wherein various titles by prominent authors are featured free in a variety of e-book formats; this month’s additions to the ever-growing library are two very, very groovy books.

The first one is ALREADY DEAD by Charlie Huston , the 1^st book in the Joe Pitt series; this book has been reviewed by Robert HERE. The blurb details are over here “Those stories you hear? The ones about things that only come out at night? Things that feed on blood, feed on us? Got news for you: they’re true. Only it’s not like the movies or old man Stoker’s storybook. It’s worse. Especially if you happen to be one of them. Just ask Joe Pitt.

Read More (and see the other book) here

via Vampire Librarian: Win a Free Copy of Vampire Taxonomy!

Don’t you love free books? Especially this time of the year when we’re all a bit strapped for cash. Therefore I’m happy to announce that we’re giving away 1 free copy of the following hilarious vampire book: “Vampire Taxonomy: Identifying And Interacting With The Modern-Day Bloodsucker”

Here’s a summary of the book:

From bestselling books to hit TV shows, there’s no denying that vampires have come a long way from the infamous monster created by Bram Stoker more than a century ago.

Our culture today is inundated with beloved blood-thirsty creatures of the night. With so many different species of vampire roaming the streets it’s important to know how to identify the different types.

More Details here

It was always frustrating when, as a teenager, I was looking for Sci Fi or Fantasy books. I ended up reading a lot of Micheal Crichton because there was nothing good in my age range. There was practically nothing, so it’s nice to see the genre being taken seriously. It’s producing good books. And even though it seems like most of what’s being published are vampire books, they have opened the door for everything else: werewolves, fairies, general shapeshifters. I had Anamorphs and that’s it. So I’m glad for the new surge.

What do you think of Young Adult books? Do you think it’s a genre worth taking seriously or is it just fluff?