Month: August 2007

In the AV Club, Noel Murray writes:

The one thing you almost never see on a chick lit cover? A face. These covers are selling a notion that the story inside will be fun and relatable, about “everywoman” (or at least “everyfictionalwoman”). Not all chick lit is generic and unchallenging, but the publishers want to at least feign that they are, which means they can’t alienate the reader by making the covers about anyone in particular.

(In fairness, few novels put faces on their covers, because they don’t want the reader to have a fixed idea of what the characters look like. But with chick lit, the addition of certain common signifiers combined with the absence of a specific personality is particularly insidious.)

He also has an excellent revisiting of Rain Man that’s worth a look.

In his review of Balls of Fury, Roger Ebert writes:

Ping-Pong* is to tennis as foosball is to soccer. I know it’s on cable now, with lots of controversy over slower balls and faster paddles, but it retains for me only memories of rainy days at summer camp. I have never lost all affection for the sport, however, and am careful to play it at least once every decade.

Ping-Pong is on cable now? And it’s controversial? Really?

A.O. Scott of The New York Times, meanwhile, calls the film “must viewing for Christopher Walken completists who have mislaid their pecial collector’s edition DVD of ‘The Country Bears.'” High praise indeed.

At the prompting of first Heather and then Jim, I’m thinking of participating in the 3-Day Novel Writing Contest. I can’t help but think this is…well, insane, even in a week when I haven’t been getting sick, but I’m considering it. Of course, it’s this weekend, and I have been getting sick, and I don’t have anything approaching an outline or, really, even an idea.

And I’m really not interested in paying the $50 entry fee…

Seriously, I love the idea of this contest, or NaNoWriMo, but in practice…? Not so much.

But I’ve got a day or two still to decide, and I’m thinking about it.

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! No, It Came From Airport Security:

BRISTOL, VA – Announcing the publication of It Came From Airport Security – an anthology of short fiction concerning what happens when confiscated liquids are dumped into trash bins. One year ago the news was flooded with images of airport security. Twenty-four people were arrested in east London, each one suspected of conspiracy to blow up airliners by mixing chemicals on board the planes. The immediate response was to confiscate all bottles of liquids and gels from passengers and to dump the contents of those bottles into large trash bins.

Featuring eight new stories, plus an introduction from yours truly! As mentioned on Boing Boing! And, as co-editor Glen Williams points out, “it’s the perfect book to be seen reading on the airplane!”

Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith:

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

A lot will be made of this on both sides of the pro- and anti-God sides of the aisle, but I can’t help just feel a little sad for the woman, who clearly yearned to feel the presence of God in her life, and also feel a little humbled by the fact that she continued for fifty-some years without it.

Via Gerry Canavan.