Foot-in-mouth disease has beset the GOP field for president. Of course, in Washington, D.C., that kind of affliction is only as painful as the media coverage that accompanies it. Few remember that Barack Obama claimed to have enjoyed his visits to the “57 states,” but who can forget poor Dan Quayle’s spelling woes with the noble potato? (more)
FreedomWorks launched a video today suggesting the libertarianish “Atlas Shrugged” film is Ripped Straight From the Headlines. (more)
Not everyone can pick up on satire and apparently that includes MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. (more)
Stieg Larsson’s partner Eva Gabrielsson plans to finish the fourth novel he left uncompleted on his death. According to early details culled from Gabrielsson’s memoir of her life with Larsson, Millennium, Stieg and Me, which is set for publication in France and Scandinavia next week,Larsson had written 200 pages of a fourth novel in his internationally successful Millennium series before he died. Gabrielsson wants to complete it because, she says, “Stieg and I often wrote together”. (more)
Given the literary muck we find ourselves mired in, I thought it might be prudent to take a step back and think about just what makes a writer do what he or she does. I started by reading about two of the writers in the news last week. Both are barometers of their respective ages; both have a distinct view of what the creative, exhausting, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding process of capturing the word on a page means to them. (more)
“I am about to embark on a great adventure,” says the hero, tucking a Colt revolver into a flour sack, donning a wide-brimmed Stetson and riding out into the wilderness on the trail of a killer. Smart, stoic and purposeful, this avenger is a stock western movie protagonist in every way but one — Mattie Ross, the central character in the new film ”True Grit,”is a 14-year-old girl. (more)
Author David Sedaris is a writer whose success story is one of the most unlikely you could imagine. CBS’ Serena Altschul reports:
David Sedaris, playing to a standing room only crowd at New York’s fabled Apollo Theater, is not a rock star, but don’t tell that to his fans. (more)
Though author Mark Twain isn’t alive to voice his opinion on the matter, an updated edition of his 126-year-old book ”The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” will eliminate all instances of the “n word.” (more)
What is a word worth? According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remove all instances of the “n” word—I’ll give you a hint, it’s notnonesuch—present in the text and replace it with slave. The new book will also remove usage of the word Injun. The effort is spearheaded by Twain expert Alan Gribben, who says his PC-ified version is not an attempt to neuter the classic but rather to update it. “Race matters in these books,” Gribben told PW. “It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.” (more)
The Christmas weekend is upon us (at last!), and so are the final days of this decade. (more)
No one is the same after encountering feisty, fearless and plain-spoken Mattie Ross, age 14, from near Dardanelle in Yell County, Ark. Not the other characters in the Charles Portis novel she dominates, and certainly not the filmmaking Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel. (more)
At long last, the most heated literary contest of the year has been decided. (more)
We are told by those who claim to know, that there are people on this planet who do not have the cinematic canon of “Harry Potter” committed to memory — otherwise sentient beings who could not tell you the difference between a Horcrux and a house-elf, who might not even know why the dark wizard Voldemort wants to kill young hero Harry. Some of those folks might be tempted to miss the first part of the series finale, which opens Friday, on the mistaken notion that six movies in, it’s too late to catch up. For these unfortunates, we offer this brief magical education. (more)
NEW DELHI — Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blamed fans of Harry Potter for the demise of wild owls in the country as children seek to emulate the boy wizard by taking the birds as pets. (more)
Reporting from New York — To tell the big-screen tale of Valerie Plame, a real-life CIA spy whose covert identity was blown by the White House, director Doug Liman needed a special kind of actress: someone who could build an emotional wall around herself and still convey “a sense that there’s a good person inside her.” (more)
Two years ago, when Woody Allen first announced a film in the works starring Larry David, I was peeing-in-my-pants excited. How could Curb Your Enthusiasm meets Annie Hall possibly go wrong? When Whatever Works finally came out last year, however, I found out how. It went wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. It didn’t stoop to Twilight levels or anything, but I had such high expectations and the movie fell totally, depressingly flat. (more)
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday as the academy honored one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most acclaimed authors and an outspoken political activist who once came close to being elected president of his tumultuous homeland. (more)
Don’t put away your Nimbus 2000 just yet! Muggles worldwide have a new sense of hope after J.K. Rowling’s “Oprah” interview. According to the Associated Press, on Friday’s show the author told Oprah that Harry and his friends “could definitely” find themselves in new adventures sometime in the future, however she is not currently working on any Potter books. (more)
According to renowned board-certified addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky, Paris Hilton’s recent drug arrest highlights how the heiress’ downward spiral is similar to another Hollywood cautionary tale. (more)
As the Julia Roberts movie opens, here’s everything a regular guy should know about Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega-selling book. Bryan Curtis on the author’s slick writing, magnetic personality, and surprising spirituality. (more)
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