The A.V. Club - Books

Books: Newswire: Marvel forces Ghost Rider creator to stop saying he's Ghost Rider creator

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:45:00 -0600

After nearly five years of bitter and depressing legal back-and-forth only slightly ameliorated by the fact that it concerned a biker with a flaming skull, Marvel has won a lawsuit that forces Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich to stop identifying himself as “Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich,” simply because he is the creator of Ghost Rider. The oddly existentialist decision brings an end to a court battle first launched back in 2007, when Friedrich sued Marvel claiming that rights to the character had reverted back to him in 2001, and were subsequently being exploited by the company’s Ghost Rider ...

Books: This Week In Local: Busdriver, Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl commercial, and a Jeffrey Dahmer movie

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:59:00 -0600

The A.V. Club has a smattering of local sites, and every day, writers in these locales are posting about music, films, and other events and news happening in their cities. Whether you live in one of these cities or elsewhere, there’s plenty of great local stuff that’s worth a look. Here’s a round-up of what caught our attention this week. • Milwaukee pondered the potential impact and the necessity (or perhaps lack thereof) of an upcoming film on Jeffrey Dahmer. • Denver sat down with rapper Busdriver about his unusual samples, emo rap, and why he’s an ...

Books: Newswire: Lemony Snicket "doesn't" want you to know about his new book series, wink wink

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

So far, reverse psychology has been an effective marketing tool for Lemony Snicket, the dour kid-lit alter ego of writer Daniel Handler. Snicket, the author/narrator/bit player in the bestselling Series Of Unfortunate Events novels, periodically told readers in promotional materials, merchandising copy, and each of the books themselves that the material he was relating was grim and depressing, and they'd be better off abandoning it. Handler as Snicket sighed and complained his way through a disapproving commentary track on the Series Of Unfortunate Events movie adaptation. And the movie itself starts with an animated sequence involving a ...

Books: Newswire: Portlandia to become a book that, yes, may or may not have a bird on it

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:24:00 -0600

In the tradition of Pawnee: The Greatest Town In America and Stuckeyville: That Place Where That TV Show ‘Ed’ Was Set, Remember That? (self-published), IFC’s Portlandia is getting its very own tie-in book due November 20. Grand Central Publishing will release Portlandia: A Guide For Visitors, which will lead readers through some of the city’s landmarks, restaurants, and assorted boutiques in a voice similar to that of the show—like Rick Steves with more jokes about dumpster-divers and DJs. Considering Portlandia is sort of the TV equivalent of one of those amusing, adorable tchotchkes you’ll find on ...

Books: Book Review: Elmore Leonard: Raylan

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:03:00 -0600

Raylan is far from the best book Elmore Leonard has ever written. In fact, it might be in the bottom third. But what makes it interesting is that many of its ideas formed the basis for the second season of FX’s Justified, a show based on Leonard’s short story “Fire In The Hole,” featuring Justified’s main character, U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens. Thanks to the vagaries of publishing schedules, the book that inspired a season of television is arriving at the same time as the debut of the show’s follow-up season. Leonard’s occasionally loose plotting ...

Books: Book Review: Will McIntosh: Hitchers

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:02:00 -0600

In fiction, dead people returning to the land of the living almost always haul a load of symbolic baggage along for the trip; as George Romero has proved over the years, the undead make potent metaphors. Most obviously, they represent the dormant past—the secrets, grudges, or longings that literally won’t stay buried. But obvious metaphors can still be powerful ones. Will McIntosh’s Hitchers, in which the spirits of the dead start taking over the living, is a fundamentally lightweight novel. But the easy style and the topic make it compulsively readable, and the curiously specific, unique way ...

Books: Book Review: John Green: The Fault In Our Stars

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:01:00 -0600

It’s hard to explain why John Green’s latest young-adult novel, The Fault In Our Stars, is so great, because any attempts to outline the plot or characters make it sound like one of the worst books ever written. Green has always excelled at writing the sorts of young-adult books where the characters learn important things about themselves, which is already dangerous territory for writing anything that’s not unrepentant treacle. And Stars’ primary characters are teenagers with cancer. He’s in the territory of Lifetime original movies. Remarkably, Stars might be Green’s best novel yet. (His previous ...

Books: Book Review: Tom McCarthy: Men In Space

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

There’s an unmistakably desperate edge to the social frenzy among the Prague expats chronicled in Tom McCarthy’s second novel, Men In Space. Their involvement in an art heist gone wrong on the eve of the Czech Republic’s creation ultimately provides these foreigners with a sense of reckoning that suffuses all their good times. The artwork, a 19th-century icon from Bulgaria, will be smuggled out of the country as soon as a local crime syndicate has time to find a talented artist who can create a realistic-enough copy to fool church officials. They find him in Ivan Maň ...

Books: Newswire: Alan Moore stands up for stealing other people's characters that are not Alan Moore's

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:32:00 -0600

Proving that a free-for-all, web-based interview can be a success so long as the subject is willing to discuss anything and is also Alan Moore, Alan Moore participated in a prolonged video Q&A over the weekend as a fundraiser for Cleveland’s proposed Harvey Pekar statue, offering answers to a variety of questions from the remote bunker secreted—in a mind-bending achievement of quantum physics—deep inside Alan Moore’s beard. You can watch the whole two and a half hours here if you have the time or inclination, but io9 picked out some of the most salient points ...

Books: Comics Panel: Graphic novels & art comics—late February and early March 2012

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

As often happened whenever the late Harvey Pekar strayed too far from the short-story format, his posthumously released graphic history Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland (Top Shelf) isn’t always as cleanly organized or coherent as it ought to be. Pekar tells the story of his hometown both in the broader sense and through his personal experiences, and the more general Pekar gets, the messier his Cleveland becomes. He jumps around from topic to topic and repeats himself, trying to get at the economic and racial woes of a city that’s gone through multiple cycles of civic pride and shame ...

Books: This Week In Local: An LOLcat revelation, Bon Iver on SNL, and welcoming Indianapolis

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

The A.V. Club has a smattering of local sites, and every day, writers in these locales are posting about music, films, and other events and news happening in their cities. Whether you live in one of these cities or elsewhere, there’s plenty of great local stuff that’s worth a look. Here’s a round-up of what caught our attention this week. • A.V. Club Indianapolis officially launched amongst much fanfare over the Super Bowl and Peyton Manning’s future. • Milwaukee prepped for Bon Iver’s SNL appearance by running down a list of sketches they’d love ...

Books: Newswire: Ask Michael Ian Black your relationship questions

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:35:00 -0600

Your local grocery store probably put up its Valentine’s Day displays as it was taking down the Christmas ones, so you know the loathed holiday is on the horizon. Less loathed: our annual Valentine’s Day feature wherein a celebrity guest answers your questions about love, sex, and relationships. In the past, we’ve had the likes of Sarah Silverman, Tim & Eric, Eugene Mirman, and Julie Klausner, and this year we’re thrilled to have Michael Ian Black taking your questions. Black’s great upcoming book, You’re Not Doing It Right: Tales Of Marriage, Sex, Death, And Other ...

Books: Book Review: Shalom Auslander: Hope: A Tragedy

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:03:00 -0600

At the opening of Hope: A Tragedy, Solomon Kugel and his family move to tiny Stockton, New York, specifically because it is a town with no history. There are bumper stickers proudly proclaiming that no famous people were born there, or that the site of a famous Revolutionary War battle took place elsewhere. But, as the book quickly makes abundantly clear, no one can run from history. Hope: A Tragedy sometimes feels a little too familiar. It’s specifically reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, where a Jewish protagonist deals with mortality, Jewish culture, and a series of ...

Books: Book Review: Elliot Perlman: The Street Sweeper

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:02:00 -0600

The historian who has lost his way at the beginning of Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper might take solace in his own story, in which an academic’s legacy is rescued and an innocent man is vindicated, as both men are awash in uncertainty about their lives. After serving time for armed robbery, Lamont Williams hopes his probationary job as a janitor in a Manhattan hospital will give him the stability he needs to get an apartment and locate his long-lost daughter. His willingness to pick up extra duties leads him to cross paths with a lonely cancer patient ...

Books: Book Review: Ben Hellwarth: Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest To Live And Work On The Ocean Floor

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:01:00 -0600

In his first book, Sealab, journalist Ben Hellwarth examines a little-known, non-ideological Cold War quest: While NASA’s race to continually one-up the Soviets in conquering outer space was well-funded headline news, similar Navy attempts to go deeper in the ocean with saturation diving were shoestring, back-page-news affairs. Hellwarth’s approach is refreshingly dry: Rather than hyperbolically claiming that this saga secretly changed everything, Sealab methodically outlines some 60 years of ocean-depths breakthroughs under-reported in their time and forgotten by history. The book’s central figure is Captain George Bond, Appalachian physician turned naval pioneer. His obsession was saturation diving ...

Books: Book Review: Graeme Kent: One Blood

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

One Blood is a murder mystery, and the second installment in a mystery series (after Devil-Devil), but it’s also an anthropological study, and a primer on the mythologies of the Solomon Islands. The plot catalysts are a tourist’s sudden death and a series of terrorist attacks on a logging company, but Graeme Kent wisely uses his protagonists and a fascinating setting to drive the book forward. Instead of simply serving up a mystery lightly spiced by exotic surroundings, One Blood delves deep into the post-colonial era of the 1960s, showing how life on the islands, among native and ...

Books: Newswire: This original Calvin And Hobbes artwork could be yours if you have a lot of money

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:35:00 -0600

In slightly more heartwarming yet no less bittersweet news involving a frustratingly reclusive comics genius, Heritage Auctions of Dallas has the only original piece of Calvin And Hobbes artwork ever to be put up for public auction—a beyond-rarity from Bill Watterson, who gifted it to comics historian Rick Marschall some 20 years ago. The drawing (seen above) comes from the 1989 Calvin And Hobbes calendar, something that is itself a collector’s item considering that Watterson never allowed the licensing of his beloved characters, thereby forcing generations of fans and dreamers to devise their own homages featuring Calvin peeing ...

Books: Newswire: Watchmen prequel to explore character back-stories, new ways to make Alan Moore angry

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:46:00 -0600

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is generally regarded as one of the accomplished works in all of comics, a title that is often held up as proof that the medium is capable of stories as fully realized as any novel. However, did you also know that it has superheroes in it that could maybe fight other bad guys? That’s a realization that’s been slowly reached over at DC Comics, which has just confirmed years of rumors (and preemptive backlash to those rumors) by announcing Before Watchmen, a prequel series unfolding this summer that will delve into the back-stories of ...

Books: Contest: Win a gift card and hardcover anniversary edition of A Wrinkle In Time

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

In honor of the classic children's book's 50th anniversary, we have one hardcover anniversary edition of A Wrinkle In Time and a $150 Visa gift card to give away to one A.V. Club reader. Read the book's synopsis and enter to win below. It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger. "Wild nights are my glory," the unearthly stranger told them. "I just got caught ...

Books: This Week In Local: Magic Cyclops, American Idol fever, and Paterno's tainted legacy

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

The A.V. Club has a smattering of local sites, and every day, writers in these locales are posting about music, films, and other events and news happening in their cities. Whether you live in one of these cities or elsewhere, there’s plenty of great local stuff that’s worth a look. Here’s a round-up of what caught our attention this week. Denver talked to local musical comedian (and this week’s American Idol oddity) Magic Cyclops. Madison also got swept up in American Idol fever thanks to one local man’s rendition of the Family Matters theme ...