A Single Layer

Father Stephen writes about doors. I have always loved doors. They can be beautiful works of art, magical opportunities to enter or be freed from. This post reminds me of when I took shelter from the rain in a Prague cathedral full of tourists.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

More book links today! Lonely planet compiles the best bookshops around the world. Have you visited any of them? Not quite book news, exactly - but Amazon will be launching a new film studio sort of thing in which amateur filmmakers and scriptwriters can submit their work and just maybe get some funding for it. The casting for Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby has been the subject of considerable internet gossip. Good to hear the role of Daisy Buchanan has gone to the brilliant starlet Carey Mulligan. Though I must confess that the disparity in age between her and DiCaprio seems just a bit . . . odd.

Screenwriter Steve Cloves talks about the process of adapting all (but one) of the Harry Potter films for the big screen over at the NYT . A fitting trailer for the fast-approaching release of Deathly Hollows, Part One. The new Barnes & Noble Nook Color shipped out today, and Gizmodo gives us a wee introduction to the techno-infant. Penguin has at last released their new line of hardcover children's classics Stateside . . . through Anthropologie ?

The trouble with listening to Psalm's album while you're trying to do anything else is that it refuses to be background music. I'm in the middle of an oceanic whirlpool, a siren-beast-woman sucking down the hapless pirate lad in the middle of the unsuspecting theatre (can you tell I'm reading teen fantasy again?) - and I keep pausing to breathe in the notes, little and big, of "Silent Song" and "Songs of Angels." Thank you, Psalm.

If anyone happens to have a ticket to Tel Aviv in just over a week, I'll gladly take that off your hands for you. One of my favorite artists (and college roommates and top of the list of most fabulously beautiful people in the world) is releasing her second album on November 25th. The album release party just happens to be on the other side of the world from me. Oh. Well. In the meantime, at least I can listen to the music in advance! Hear Psalm along with her (incredible) accompaniment here .

I finished Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan the other night, and it was excellent. The major characters were given just enough time to develop on their own before they met up with each other and we started to see them through each others' eyes. I finally got used to people walking around the inside of a flying whale. I finally also got used to thinking of metallic legs rather than wheels/those-treaded-conveyer-things on a tanker as being a good thing. I also got used to the characters, the tone, the general world of it all, so that when I set it down upon its final page and picked up Boneshaker by Cherie Priest a few moments later, it came as a wee bit of a shock. There's the difference, you see, between YA lit and adult lit. I don't know what it is exactly, because they're both beautifully written books (and beautifully designed, too - Keith Thompson's phenomenal illustrations in Leviathan vie with Boneshaker 's incredible graphic design and formatting). But...

So, I've actually been reading Leviathan , pictured and posted below, and I find myself continually approaching it as an academic. It's hard not to, since the book re-imagines the origins and development of the first world war. There's so much cultural, social, historical, philosophical richness to those origins. Who could resist a little intellectual elaboration? I scribbled about four pages worth of thoughts on steampunk's revisionist historicism as a method of preservation against eschatological fears (among other things). Then I read this post over at Millinerd , and I get a whole other wave of thoughts on steampunk as a way of infusing post-enlightenment history with the aesthetic consciousness it originally lacked. I have no idea if I'm off-base with this or not, but we have wandered around for so many years regretting the apparently ugliness of the inheritance of the enlightenment. Could steampunk be a way of unconsciously (or otherwise) re-imagining that br...

Scott Westerfield picked up on the steampunk train because he is smart about stories and creative with his brain. Mucho kudos to him for that. But as much as you should read his books ( Leviathan , for a start, which is sitting by my bedside even now), you should also read his blog . If nothing else, read it for phrases like "RATHER MORE BAD" referring to costumed Storm Troopers as opposed to aristocratic nobility, all in response to that Charles Stross article that's got steamers all fabulously defensive of their genre. Gah. He's delightful. Charles Stross, on the other hand, is not. At least not in this post. We'd probably have some lovely conversations over even lovelier tea in any other context. But really, only someone very short-sighted would be so condescending both to history and to fanboys all in one fell swoop - and on the internet, no less! The irony will come around in about a hundred years when Stross's grandchildren look at our generation and c...

Felix Gilman, author of The Half-Made World , was discussing the trend toward anachronistic fiction over at Omnivoracious yesterday. (Sidenote: If you are interested in trends in the book industry and you don't follow Omnivoracious, you are doing yourself a disservice. It's Amazon's book blog, and they do a fabulous job of letting you know all the most relevant book buzz in the most unpretentious and jovial sort of way.) I had seen the cover for The Half-Made World somewhere else last week and was half a click away from posting it to my Pinterest board featuring lovely cover designs when something (squirrel?) distracted me. Serious failure. This cover just makes me love cover art all the more. I double-perked up about the book when I noticed the Ursula K. LeGuin blurb on the front. Sometimes when a notable author blurbs your book that just means you got lucky. Or you found yourself a really awesome publicist/agent/editor/spy who managed to blackmail said notable author i...

In about two and a half weeks, I will be making the trek to Seattle to join a hoard of rather fascinating people celebrating a fast-growing subgenre of fantasy/sci-fi most commonly known as Steampunk. As a publisher, I will be sitting on panels acknowledging the importance of the sub-genre, the growth of the sub-genre into it's own genre proper, and a number of other things I haven't figured out yet. The truth is that I know very little about steampunk in general. What I do know, I know as a not-so-distant observer of culture. I know as an expert in my field - the book industry. I know as much as anyone else who has visited steampunk blogs, webshops, and bookstore shelves with the curious fascination that comes over one who feels too old to join a new trend but young enough to realize that I would have eaten it up ten years ago. Even so, when I mention steampunk to friends/family/acquaintances, I realize that I do, actually, know a lot more than I give myself credit for. Much o...

Anne Rice gives her thoughts on the Twilight series, and everyone is up in arms on one side of the fence or another. Which is funny, 'cause I don't see these lines as being very critical: [' Twilight ']’s based on a really silly premise: that immortals would go to high school. It's a failure of imagination, but at the same time, that silly premise has provided Stephenie Meyer with huge success," Anne said. "The idea that if you are immortal you would go to high school instead of Katmandu or Paris or Venice, it’s the vampire dumbed down for kids. But it's worked. It's successful. It makes kids really happy. Sure, calling the Twilight books "silly" isn't very flattering, but "it's worked" and "it's successful" and "it makes kids really happy" sound pretty good to me, considering the vast expanse between Anne Rice's version of vampires and Stephenie Meyer's. The article later concedes ...