Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

I’m not exactly sure when I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It might have been in college as part of a black literature course or after college as “required reading” for any young black person with any level of race consciousness. But I have certainly come to know Ellison more through reading about him, particularly [...]

According to this story at firstshowing.net, Stephen Spielberg is directing an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982), a children’s novel about Albert, a young British farm boy, and Joey, his friend, who’s sold to the army and sent off to serve in the First World War. Don’t panic: Joey’s a horse, not a boy. He narrates the [...]

Okay, you’re an author – is it a good idea to put yourself in a trailer? Maybe. Maybe not. Especially dull, though, would be to sit yourself down a stool and simply describe the plot of your book. Unless, of course, during the course of that description, your face began to, well . . . [...]

I can scarcely believe it, but after nearly 40 years of “development hell,” it looks like someone is finally making a movie out of Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel, published in 1957, is brilliant, complex, thought-provoking, and — in my opinion — utterly unfilmable. But I wish them well. Apparently, according to this report [...]

If you’re coming to the American Library Association’s 2010 Annual Conference in Washington, DC (and if you haven’t decided yet, you’d better hurry), please be sure to add the Booklist Online program, “Everyone’s a Critic: The Future of Book Reviewing” to your calendar. It will be held Saturday, June 26 from 1:30-3:30 p.m. at the [...]

Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, is a sequel to his first book, Less Than Zero. A handful of Ellis’s books have been adapted for the big screen, and it hasn’t always been an easy transition. Less Than Zero (book 1985; movie ’87) and Rules of Attraction (book 1987;  movie 2002) have some good [...]

I know there have been rumors floating around for a couple of years, but I keep hoping they’re true, and someone really is making a movie out of Bill Bryon’s A Walk in the Woods (1998). Robert Redford is said to be “attached,” and maybe even Barry Levinson too. Get on with it, guys. A [...]

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, subtitled On Sranger Tides, is based on Tim Powers’ popular 1988 novel of the same name (switching out Powers’ characters for Jack Sparrow and the gang). It’s not the only pirate movie that’s based on a book. The various movies called Treasure Island, or something similar (there are at [...]

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna bested critical favorite Wolf Hall to win the £30,000 Orange Prize. Read more about Kingsolver’s win (nine years in the making!) at the Guardian.

Larry Doyle’s very funny Go, Mutants! takes place in an alternate American past, where chicks in poodle skirts and punks in black leather jackets share the high school hallways with all sorts of gooey, tentacled aliens, who landed on the planet and were assimilated 20 years earlier. Doyle is an acolyte of the sci-fi shockers [...]