Buzz Worthy News: January 23, 2017

23 January, 2017 Buzz Worthy News 3 comments

BWN-bee-graphicWelcome to Buzz Worthy News where the stories are awesome (or at least fun to read). Need your book industry news? Never fear, Kate Copeseeley is here to give it to you straight.

In this week’s Buzz Worthy News: #Logan Trailer, Captain America Prank, #GoodOmens News, and #WomensMarch Author Tweets. All this and more!

Buzz Worthy News is Cuddlebuggery’s weekly news post bringing you all the best information about the book and blogging world, particularly for the venn diagram of people who overlap between the two.

 

New Logan Trailer

House of Cards Teaser Trailer

It’s chilling. CHILLING.

Captain America (ahem Chris Evans) Pranked Fans for Charity

Handsome and nice, what a guy!

Chris Evans got into character for a great cause.

The Captain America star recently channeled the silver screen hero in the name of charity when he collaborated with Omaze to surprise strangers shopping in a comic book store in his native Massachusetts.

Since the actor is giving fans the opportunity to participate in an Escape Room challenge with him to raise money for Christopher’s Haven, his team transformed the shop into a mock room crawling with riddles and puzzles geared to test participants.

Evans kicked off the game with a Captain America doll that was set up in the middle of the store and hooked up to a speaker. While hiding in a separate room, Evans spoke to unsuspecting shoppers and asked them if they were willing to take on his challenge.

Once he had their attention, the star gave them a series of objectives, including finding a four-digit code, dressing up in masks and goggles and locating a hidden Hydra operative out on the Boston streets.

After uncovering a secret door in the store, players crept into a dark basement, but their flashlights suddenly shut off. Fortunately, Evans was waiting for them there to make the grand reveal.

“Now that you’ve seen what Escape Rooms are all about, let’s see if you have what it takes to get out of one,” he said in a video.

Here is the video

Here is where you can donate and get a chance to do an “escape the room” adventure with Evans himself.

 

Source

Good Omens Will Be On Amazon Next Year!!!!!

They had me with Man in the High Castle, but Amazon didn’t stop there!  Now they’ve snagged the fabulous book about the apocalypse that’s been adapted into a series to be released next year.

Gaiman, who is also serving as showrunner on the series, has written all six one-hour episodes. The show, which has been co-produced with BBC Studios, will premiere in 2018 on Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video, and will be broadcast on the BBC in the UK soon afterwards.

The fantasy comedy follows Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a devil, who team up to prevent the apocalypse when the antichrist is reborn as a child in rural Britain. The adaptation, based on Gaiman and Pratchett’s 1990 bestseller, will bring the setting forward to the year 2018.

“Good Omens takes place in 2018 when the Apocalypse is near and Final Judgment is set to descend upon humanity. According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter Witch (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner,” Amazon’s description of the series reads.

“So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, and tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except Aziraphale, a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley, a fast-living demon – both of whom have lived among Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle – are not actually looking forward to the coming war. And … someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist.”

In statement, Gaiman said: “Almost 30 years ago, Terry Pratchett and I wrote the funniest novel we could about the end of the world, populated with angels and demons, not to mention an 11-year old antichrist, witchfinders and the four horsepeople of the Apocalypse. It became many people’s favourite book. Three decades later, it’s going to make it to the screen. I can’t think of anyone we’d rather make it with than BBC Studios, and I just wish Sir Terry were alive to see it.”

 

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The Night Manager Team Adapts Another Novel

Thinking Speaking of Tom Hiddleston’s butt, the creators of the popular series The Night Manager are adapting another John Le Carré book The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. 

The BBC1 show will be another co-production with US network AMC, following the huge success of The Night Manager, which starred Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman.

Le Carré said he was looking forward to seeing a new version of it on screen: “I’m very excited by the project, and have great confidence in the team.”

Simon Beaufoy, the writer of Slumdog Millionaire and The Full Monty, has been enlisted by the BBC to adapt the series, while The Ink Factory, which worked on The Night Manager, will produce.

Beaufoy said: “It’s incredibly exciting to be working on the best cold war spy story ever written.”

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which was written in 1963, follows Alec Leamas, a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer whose east Berlin network is in tatters.

His agents have either disappeared or are dead at the hands of the East German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Dieter Mundt, but Leamas is soon offered a chance of revenge when he is recalled to London.

Is it wrong that all I want to know is if they’re showing someone’s butt again?

 

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Mark Twain Fairytale??

Apparently, Mark Twain used to tell his daughters a fairytale when they were young about a boy who can talk to animals—thanks to the help of a magical flower. A man named John Bird was reading through the Twain archives at UC Berkeley and he found notes for the story, titled “Oleomargarine”. But the tale of this bedtime story doesn’t end there:

After consulting a few other scholars, Mr. Bird brought the text to the attention of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, which sold it to Doubleday Books for Young Readers. This fall, Doubleday will release “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine,” an expanded version of the story that was fleshed out and reimagined by the children’s book author-and-illustrator team of Philip and Erin Stead.

 From Twain’s spare ur-text, the Steads created a 152-page illustrated story featuring talking animals, giants, dragons, a kidnapped prince and a wicked king. While the original work has a timeless quality, the Steads added a postmodern twist: Twain himself makes an appearance in the book, to argue with the author, Philip Stead, about the direction the story takes.

Erin Stead, who did the illustrations, said they were very aware of the creative risks involved in taking on the work of such a towering literary figure.

“We both just tried to approach the text respectfully and with as much reverence as possible,” she said. “No one’s qualified to write for Mark Twain.”

We’ve reported here before about “found” manuscripts of other children’s book authors, such as Dr. Seuss and Beatrix Potter. I always have mixed feelings about them. This one is more the style of a fairy tale, and so it seems to me kind of like a new adaption. Hopefully it’s a good story.

The manuscript was just 16 handwritten pages long, and unfinished. It opens as a poor starving boy named Johnny is given a magic seed, which grows into a flower. He eats it and discovers he can understand animals. Johnny and the animals go on a quest to rescue Prince Oleomargarine, who has been kidnapped by giants and taken to a cave guarded by dragons. At one point, Twain scribbled down a suggestion that his daughter Susie made, when she asked if the kangaroo was the hostess.

“I tried to approach the project as a piece of oral history,” Mr. Stead said. “This was a story that Twain told his daughters, and now he’s going to tell it to me, and now I’m going to tell it.”

The book is schedule for publication fall of 2017.

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New President To Eliminate National Endowment For The Arts?

As part of a plan to make deep cuts in Federal Spending, President Trump would like to cut a program that has been in existence since 1965. The National Endowment for the Arts(the NEA) supports projects that it considers to be high in artistic excellence. It is an independent agency. How will this affect the book world, you ask. Hey, guess what? It supports writers!

Literature Fellowships represent the National Endowment for the Arts’ most direct investment in American creativity. The goal of the fellowships program is to encourage the production of new work and allow writers the time and means to write. During the past 40+ years, the Arts Endowment has awarded more than $45 million to more than 3,000 writers, and sponsored work resulting in excess of 2,400 books, including many of the most acclaimed novels of contemporary literature: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, William Kennedy’s Ironweed, and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer with support from an NEA Translation Fellowship.

Since 1990, 83 of the 141 American recipients of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were previous NEA Literature Fellows.

So yes, it does provide a service.

The Washington Post lays it all out nicely, so I’m going to quote them here:

In total, the administration aims to cut spending by $10.5 trillion over the next decade.

Humans are innately bad at scale when it comes to big numbers. A million, a billion, a trillion — it all sort of blends together. That can make discussions about the massive size of the federal budget somewhat confusing.

So let’s look at the 2016 appropriations for the three programs identified in that quote above and compare them with the overall outlays of the federal government. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received $445 million in 2016. (It gets additional funding from donors like you.) NEA got $148 million. NEH requested the same. The Congressional Budget Office figures that about $3.9 trillion was spent by the government during the fiscal year.

If you were at Thanksgiving and demanded a slice of pecan pie proportionate to 2016 NEA spending relative to the federal budget, you’d end up with a piece of pie that would need to be sliced off with a finely-tuned laser. Put another way, if you make $50,000 a year, spending the equivalent of what the government spends on these three programs would be like spending less than $10.

If the Trump team wants to slice out $1.05 trillion annually (divvying up that $10.5 trillion number), ending funding for these three programs only gets you 0.074 percent of the way there.

It remains to be seen, what will be cut and what will not.

Sources HERE and HERE

Uplifting Story(ies) of the Week

Library Book Returned 100 Years Late

Hilariously titled “Forty Minutes Late”, a book checked out to a woman who died before she could return it 100 years ago was returned by her great grandson Webb Johnson under San Francisco’s current library amnesty program. It means he paid no fine, which THANK GOODNESS because it would have been $3,650!!!

The book, a collection of short stories published in 1909, had been checked out by his great-grandmother Phoebe Webb in 1917 from the old Fillmore branch which, like his great-grandmother, is no longer around.

And under the library’s current amnesty program for overdue books, there’s no fine at all.

The amnesty program has gotten 2,000 overdue books back onto library shelves since it began Jan. 3. About 1,400 delinquent borrowers have had their library privileges restored. An additional 54,000 patrons with accumulated fines of $10 or more are still walking around with suspended library cards. Under the amnesty program, they have until Feb. 14 to turn in their books with no penalty.

The amnesty came in handy because Johnson said he had discovered the overdue book in 1996 and had hung onto it ever since. That means “Forty Minutes Late” has been unintentionally late for 79 years and deliberately late for 21 years.

“We figured it was ours now,” Johnson said. “I’m guilty. I know it. Guilty, guilty, guilty.”

Well, at least the library got its book back, and nobody had to pay three grand! 😀

Source

John Lewis Book Sales Soar

Civil Rights activist, United States Representative, and writer John Lewis has been outspoken about his belief that Donald Trump is not a legitimate president. Say what you will about his beliefs and the backlash that resulted for him and President Trump, there is good news out of the whole thing, and that is a renewal of interest in black history and the Civil Rights Movement. Essence reports:

Sales of Walking With the Wind, his 1998 memoir, have jumped more than 800,000 percent, The Guardian reports. March, a graphic-novel trilogy of his life that Lewis helped write, has jumped 76,000 percent. Both March and Walking with the Wind are topping the book charts in Amazon, and five of the six books that have gained the most sales in the last 24 hours on Amazon are by Lewis.

The books chart Lewis’ life journey, from the child of sharecroppers in Alabama to a leader of the Civil Rights movement showing he is indeed a man of all action and results.

Source

And just for funsies, tweets of authors attending the #WomensMarch

https://twitter.com/VeronicaRoth/status/822846599688753157

https://twitter.com/melissaanelli/status/822842290154651648

https://twitter.com/jenniferweiner/status/822877595603783680

Interesting Links

Book Slumps suck, but they can be useful

Every Book Obama Has Recommended

3 Responses to “Buzz Worthy News: January 23, 2017”

  1. Natalie Monroe

    I find it hilariously ironic the overdue book is called Forty Minutes Late. XD

  3. Carina Olsen

    Yay for lots of awesome news 😀 As always, gorgeous post Kate. <3 You are the bestest. Hugs. I loved seeing so many pictures from the women's march 😀 It was such an aaamazing day. Yay 😀