Beware Vampire Hoover-villes
Somewhere in California, there is a “tent city of enthusiastic vampire lovers.” Read today’s news to find out where!
- The time has come – you can stop re-reading Harry Potter. Or at least, put it down for a moment to check out Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. The book has been pitched as “Harry Potter for grown-ups,” a description Omnivoracious calls accurate, if not exhaustive. The blog discusses the book and interviews Grossman about the influence Harry and friends had on his writing and his main characters. See, in The Magicians, the protagonists are somewhat nerdy American teenagers, so of course they’ve read Harry Potter. When they discover they have their own powers, they expect a Hogwarts-style boarding school, but get an American equivalent. You can read more about it in the interview, but you’ll have to wait a month to get the book.
- Publishers Weekly has news from the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con International, where 125,000 fans are expected to roam through the exhibitions and special panels through Sunday. Not surprisingly, the panel drawing the biggest crowd is tomorrow night’s Twilight: New Moon panel with Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. People waiting for the event have camped out and formed what PW calls “an impromptu tent city of enthusiastic vampire lovers.” There are also a handful of people interested in the fantasy and graphic novels inside the convention center… probably.
- In his new story collection, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, Damion Searls uses short stories from classic writers as a starting point for his own reworked versions. The Guardian features a podcast of Searls reading “A Guide to San Francisco,” a transformation of Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin.” Go ahead and listen to it - especially if you can’t do any traveling of your own this weekend.
- Hope for every dissatisfied employee! French author Anna Sam talks to NPR about turning her days as a checkout clerk into a memoir that’s been translated into 16 languages. The key to her success was starting a blog about the funny observations she was able to make as a quasi-invisible store clerk. Not only did the blog (Cassiere No Futur) skyrocket into popularity and gain the attention of publishers, but it helped Sam see her everyday life in a more positive, humorous light. So in case you needed more proof, there it is – blogging is good for the soul (and occasionally the bank account).
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