Roger Sutton over at the Horn Book’s blog has echoed one of his reader comments about a desire for a Gothic revival. His comments seem to be timed with the Daphne du Maurier revival last year (the centenary of her birth) and re-reading of Jamaica Inn. I’ve only read Rebecca and some of the sequels [...]
I’ve just come across a link to this interview with Eoin Colfer published in Newsweek where he talks about his new novel, The Airman, his influences and sending gliders of from a Norman castle. I love the new book and pretty much read it on one go: its a great novel of adventure and real [...]
Sebastian Peake’s blog gives details of the collected poems of his father, Mervyn, coming out from Carcanet later this year. Most famous for Gormenghast, Peake was a great poet and a fantastic illustrator – both of which talents are a little overshadowed now.
He died 50 years ago on November 17th, 1968 and I hope to [...]
It appears that Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Cronos) is in talks to take on the Hobbit film. Jackson is up to his eyeballs in projects but will be the executive producer with creative control.
The film itself will be divided into two (and this make me nervous). The first part covers the Hobbit novel [...]
LinuxJournal has a piece on the use of Linux to render the CGI in the forthcoming Spiderwick Chronicles movie which comes out in the UK on 21 March. (Sorry, annoyingly its behind a pay wall at the moment online but is in the print version.)
A quick plot summary from the trailers appear to be Jared [...]
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography have added Joan Aiken (of the fabulous Wolves of Willoughby Hall fame), Anthony Buckeridge (of the Jennings school boy stories) and Norman Thelwell (whose pony images are to die laughing for) to the online version. All of them died in 2004.
I believe that if your local library has an [...]
Brian Selznick, whose The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Amazon) won the Caldecott Medal earlier this month, is that wonderful of beings: the slightly off-centre obsessed geek and it shows in his great novel. Hugo – an orphan, thief and clockmaker – lives in the train station in Paris in anonymity when he meets a mysterious [...]
Chris Riddell, the illustrator half of Paul Stewart/Chris Riddell, has an exhibition of his political cartoons for the Observer newspaper. The cartoons are always pointed and humorous whilst getting the themes of the year across to the reader.
The exhibition is at the Guardian Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3GA.
Opening Times:
Monday to Friday 10am [...]
This afternoon as break from what I was doing, I searched for Nazgul on Google as I was curious as to who else had used the Nazgul type creature in either book or film and came across this wonderful story about Snoopy and the Nazgul. (Before anybody says it, yes its old but it still [...]
Ursula LeGuin has started putting MP3s onto her site. Currently she has an extract of the Wizard of Earthsea and some poems from Wild Angels (Introduction, Ars Lunga, The Young, Tao Song).
There are planned extracts from Buffalo Gals and other Animal Presences and Incredible Good Fortune which look like they’ll appear on this page of [...]