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 mentioned a while ago — if you missed that post, it’s here –  that Joel and Ethan Coen, the excellent writing/directing team, are doing a new version of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel True Grit. The trailer is now online, and here it is: I might be biased, because I’m such a fan of the [...]

In case you haven’t heard the news already, Mario Vargas Llosa, the 74-year-old Peruvian author of more than 30 works, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He burst onto the international scene with the publication of  The Time of the Hero during the 1960′s. His later works include A Fish in the Water (1994). [...]

According to this story at Ain’t It Cool News, Gavin Hood, director of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, is taking a stab at adapting Orson Scott Card’s classic novel Ender’s Game (1985).   This isn’t the first time somebody’s tried to make a movie out of the book. It’s been tried, or suggested, a handful of times, [...]

During a ceremony emceed by Keith Olbermann, Steve Hely accepted a $5,000 prize for his 2009 novel How I Became a Famous Novelist. Thurber House calls it “a hilarious send-up of literary pretensions and celebrity culture, with dead-on parodies of genres, bestseller lists, and even the writing process itself.”

The Social Network, the new movie about the people who made Facebook, is getting a lot of publicity. The television ads hype the director, David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, Fight Club), and the writer, Aaron Sorkin (The American President, The West Wing, A Few Good Men), but, as television commercials generally do, they ignore the guy [...]

Much of the media coverage of the suicide of Kevin Morrissey, the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s managing editor, was downright sensationalistic, teasing out allegations that he may have been driven to it by the bullying of his boss, editor Ted Genoways. Now, in Slate, Emily Bazelon’s “Tragedy at the Virginia Quarterly Review” offers a more nuanced and [...]

Paul Harding’s Tinkers took home the $35,000 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. Winners also included Don DeLillo, Susan Choi, and David Mamet. For a complete  list of recipients, visit the PEN Literary Awards website. Among this year’s MacArthur Fellows are Annette Gordon-Reed (The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, 2008), Yiyun Li (The Vagrants, 2009), and [...]