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

Consider this BTT a call to pre-”Read the Screen”: trailers have recently been released for film versions of beloved novels. Neither is due in theaters until later this year, giving faithful re-readers reason to pick them up anew and new readers plenty of time to find out where it all began. While this is certainly [...]

Even master of imagination Tim Burton draws inspiration from the most classic of classics, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Remaking a short film he created almost 30 years ago, Burton’s feature-length, stop motion-animated Frankenweenie will hit theaters in the spooky season of Fall 2012. This time Frankenstein is a kid named Victor whose “monster” is his beloved [...]

This week’s BTT doesn’t quite qualify as a trailer, but I’d argue that it has the same intented result as one: what better way to drum up excitement for a new book than by inviting the blogosphere to step right up and share hilarious and heartbreaking tales of their own? The Why We Broke Up [...]

Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, has spawned a plethora of movie adaptations, homages, rip-offs, and spin-offs. Its literary progeny are fewer, but there are some interesting literary spin-offs. First and most obvious is Dracula: the Un-Dead (2009), a direct sequel written by Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great-grandnephew, and Dracula scholar Ian Holt. It’s an imaginative and [...]

Okay, so you’ve seen, and this is just a conservative estimate, 1,489,226 television shows and movies based — sometimes exceedingly loosely — on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). But how many literary spin-offs have you read? Adam Roberts, the British science fiction writer and parodist — I talked about him back in March, in [...]

It’s probably safe to assume you’re aware of the myriad Sherlock Holmes stories written by people who are not, strictly speaking, Arthur Conan Doyle. Or the James Bond novels by writers who bear not even a passing resemblance to Ian Fleming.   Those are probably the most famous literary spin-offs, but they’re  hardly the only ones. From time to [...]