Tag Archives: fiction

Around the Interwebs: Volume XXII

13 May

Stephen Colbert and Carey Mulligan Learn All About The Great Gatsby from LeVar Burton and “Reading Rainbow” (via Hollywood)

Stephen Colbert Great Gatsby

“Reading Rainbow” is back! Kind of. Sort of. Not really. To celebrate his super Gatsby themed show, host Stephen Colbert decided to hold a book club (the first rule is you don’t read Fight Club) in which he meant to read The Great Gatsby but then totally didn’t. Colbert invites Carey Mulligan on the show to tell him about the plot, but since she can’t even read and is merely dubbed over by James Franco, LeVar Burton steps in to help with his trusty butterfly in the sky. Head over to the original source to check out all the Gatsby, all the nostalgia, and all the “Star Trek” references.

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Book Giveaway: “Lovecraft Middle School: Teacher’s Pest” by Charles Gilman

8 May

Teacher's Pest by Charles GilmanThe always inventive publisher Quirk Books, who brought the world the mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has a new offering to salivate your horror taste buds, a book series inspired by the works of HP Lovecraft written for children. Yes, for kiddies. Think of it as Goosebumps for a brand new generation.

In conjunction with the amazing and fabulous team over at Quirk Books, we are giving away the newest and third book in the series, Teacher’s Pest, complete with lenticular cover!!!

Hit the jump below to find out how to enter to win and see all pertinent rules. The contest begins on May 8th and ends on May 22nd.

Don’t be fooled by his friendly smile, his perfect manners, or his shiny red apple. Student council president Howard Mergler is actually a sinister bug-monster in disguise—and he’s summoning swarms of roaches, wasps, fleas, and head lice into the corridors of Lovecraft Middle School! Twelve-year-old Robert Arthur is the only student who can stop him–but he’ll need help from his best friends: the school bully, the school ghost, and an extremely courageous two-headed rat.

This third novel in the Lovecraft Middle School series begins right where Professor Gargoyle and The Slither Sisters ended—with more action, more adventure, and more outrageous monsters.

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Thursday Next Goes All Timey Wimey: Cassie-la Attempts to Explain “The Woman Who Died a Lot” by Jasper Fforde

3 May

The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper FfordeThe Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde
Genre: Fiction, fantasy, alternate history, science fiction, humor, literary, time travel even confuses fictional characters
Rating: 4.67 out of 5 stars

Summary: Thursday Next’s adventure continues in the seventh book in the series set in an alternate history version of  the UK where literature is taken very seriously. Following her escapade in One of Our Thursdays is Missing, Thursday is injured and unable to travel into the fictional BookWorld and instead takes a job offer to run the Swindon Library where books are protected with lethal force. Featuring God, time travel and synthetic doppelgangers, this is the strangest Thursday Next yet.

If you have yet to read any books in the Thursday Next series, then I highly recommend you start. The franchise takes place in an alternate history version of the world (specifically England) where literature is so well-loved that there is a special police division to protect it, political groups centered around famous authors and if you were to enter the original manuscript of a novel you could change the events within them. Did I mention there’s time travel and extinct animals have been re-engineered as pets? Well there’s all that too.

For your perusing pleasure, the other books in the series include: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels and One of Our Thursdays is Missing. (Pssst, The Eyre Affair is all about Jane Eyre and Something Rotten stars the Hamlet.)

This newest incarnation of the series, which features an older Thursday with grown children (Tuesday, Friday and the imaginary Jenny who is really just a mind-worm implanted in Thursday by her nemesis Aornis Hades) is the most confusing and inventive book so far. Bear with me while I explain the plot, because it’s a whole lotta plot.

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Around the Interwebs: Volume XXI

29 Apr

There Might Be an American Psycho Musical If You Put Your Money Where That Big Gaping Hole in Your Face Is (via Kickstarter)

American Psycho Musical

American Psycho, the book turned movie is now becoming a musical. SAY WHAT!?! At least in theory if the AP musical Kickstarter raises $150,000 to put the play on in London. Featuring music and lyrics by Spring Awakening’s Duncan Sheik and director Rupert Goold who has done too much to mention (including Macbeth and Richard II for BBC). Rewards include a Patrick Bateman business card flash drive loaded with songs from the musical, art prints, amazing t-shirts with fab one-liners like, “that’s a very fine Chardonnay you’re not drinking” and signed/limited edition copies of the novel. Not to mention, amazing 80′s styled tunes. Is donating something you are? Or is it something you do?

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Shameless Self-Promotion Time! Help Fund “Unknowing: An Anthology From Beyond the Veil”

19 Apr

Unknowing an Anthology From Beyond the VeilUnknowing: An Anthology From Beyond the Veil [edited] by Jeff Kowalski
Genre: Fiction, horror, anthology, short stories, suspense, dread, the unknown

Summary (taken from the Kickstarter page):

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” – H.P. Lovecraft

Our goal with this anthology is to publish some underground and unpublished authors, while exploring a genre near and dear to us: Horror. We’d love your help in this endeavor! In exchange for your pledge, we’ll send along an e-book (PDF, ePub, and perhaps other formats) collection of the stories once it’s complete.

Dear ladies, gentleman and tentacles, I thought I’d do something a wee bit different this week and talk a little bit about a horror anthology Kickstarter that my fellow Cassie (Cassie-wa) and I are contributing short stories to.

So we all know what I’m really saying is…

IF YOU LOVE THE SITE AND YOU LOVE US, OR YOU JUST LOVE HORROR SHORT STORIES YOU SHOULD SERIOUSLY DONATE TO OUR KICKSTARTER SO WE CAN GET SOMETHING IN PRINT THAT WASN’T PUBLISHED AT THE AGE OF TEN IN ONE OF THOSE TERRIBLE POETRY BOOKS. WE’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER.

Did that read as desperate? Nah, I played it cool.

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Winter Is Already Over, You Know Nothing, Jon Snow: Getting Ready for “Game of Thrones” Battle Lemon Cake Style

29 Mar

Ommegang Iron Throne AdLast year for the premiere of “Game of Thrones” season two, I embarked on a seemingly never-ending quest to find the best lemon cake recipe inspired by the Song of Ice and Fire series. This resulted in countless trips to the grocery stores to buy lemons and bags of flour, hours of trial and error and a whole lot of oven related burns. Although none that burned like having a pot of molten gold poured on my scale-less skin.

Thankfully, for season three (WHICH COMES OUT ON SUNDAY, OMG IT’S ALMOST HERE!!!) I know exactly which lemon cake to make, so I don’t have to waste my time. Bonus: Ommegang brewery has graciously provided Iron Throne Ale to drink while watching everyone you love die.

In anticipation of the season which will contain a whole lot of weddings and funerals- as in more than any Hugh Grant movie- I decided to share my lemon cake journey in a culinary adventure I like to call: Battle Lemon Cake.

This was originally posted during season two, throughout 2012, over on my personal blog (which gets very little use): Fli Brish. It has been touched up/edited accordingly to reflect all the shenanigans in season two and I have included appropriate yelling because I still have serious Team Lemon Cake feels.

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How to Wrongly Profit Off the Wonderland Fandom: Cassie-la Hulk Smashes “Alice in Zombieland” by Gena Showalter

25 Mar

Alice in Zombieland - Gena ShowalterAlice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter
Genre: Fiction, young adult, zombies, horror, romance, remind me again what this has to do with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Summary: Alice Bell’s father is terrified of monsters hurting his family. As a result, Alice isn’t allowed out at night, and she’s certainly not allowed to walk near any cemeteries. But when her entire family dies in a horrific accident, she learns the hard way that her father may not be as crazy as she thought he was. Starring: a love interest with a hard muscular chest, a best friend with dialogue straight out of a Diablo Cody script, a cast of peripheral characters with terrible names and Alice, who is so attractive that everyone wants to have sex with her. Not starring: anything to do with Alice in Wonderland except a rabbit shaped cloud.

Once again I have gotten overly excited about an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and yet again I have thrown my money at something that merely seeks to profit off the renewed popularity of the books rather than pay homage to the little girl in a strange new world. It happened with the Tim Burton movie, the YA novel Splintered and it’s happened yet again with Alice in Zombieland. (Not to be confused with the awesome Threadless shirt or the book of the same name by Nickolas Cook of which I couldn’t make it through more than a page of.)

Despite obviously being marketed to fans of Wonderland (see the gorgeous cover if you need a reason why I jumped to this conclusion) there isn’t much of anything to connect the novel to Lewis Carroll’s world except the book title and the chapter names, which aren’t even that good on their own: Down the Zombie Hole, The Pool of Blood and Tears, Eerily Curiouser and Curiouser…, Advice from a Dying Caterpillar, and A Fiendishly Mad Tea Party.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the main character is named Alice and she keeps seeing a cloud in the shape of a white rabbit. Seriously, I would have rather been pandered to than abused for my love of all things Alice.

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Bibliomantic Book Club: “The Madness Underneath” by Maureen Johnson

22 Mar

Madness Underneath - Maureen JohnsonThe Madness Underneath by Maureen Johnson
Release Date: February 26, 2013
Genre: Fiction, young adult, supernatural, paranormal, ghosts

Summary: Rory can see ghosts, which isn’t as awesome as it sounds. For example, as a result of her power she was chased by an entity recreating the Jack the Ripper murders and was left with a nasty scar to prove it. Now she’s got even more troublesome otherworldly powers and a desire to return to a normal life. Whatever that is anymore. Torn by her devotion to her family, her school friends, her new boyfriend and the super secret government ghost fighting organization in London, Rory is struggling to find her place in the regular world and the world of the undead. Because in the Shades of London series, life sucks and then you die. And sometimes you come back as a ghost.

When we last left Rory (full name Aurora) she was dealing with the ramifications of all the events that happened in book one, The Name of the Star (review HERE). In this sequel, she’s healing from all that nonsense, struggling to return some normalcy to her life and trying to deal with the world knowing her as that Ripper girl. We highly recommend you read the first book before you even attempt to tackle this one. Trust us, it’s full of Jack the Ripper goodness. End tedious introductory paragraph.

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Around the Interwebs: Volume XIX

9 Mar

Gary Busey Explains How Hobbits Are Real and Why They’re Horny. Through Song. (via StarCrush)

For some reason (that reason most likely being brain damage) actor Gary Busey is under the impression that Hobbits are real. So much so that on his YouTube series “The Busey Zone” he shows off his severed Hobbit foot and sings a song about how they’re really horny. Jump to 3:28 for that nonsense. Because in Gary Busey land, “Horny starts with an H. The letter H. Hobbits start with the letter H. Horny Hobbits are thriving in Middle-earth. They don’t know what a reindeer is, but they’re horny like you can’t believe it.” This guy’s brain is like a bag full of cats.

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Around the Interwebs: Volume XVIII

2 Mar

Rick Yancey’s Viral Campaign for the YA Sci-Fi Series The 5th Wave Has Begun (via Hypable)

The 5th Wave

The campaign for Rick Yancey- the author of The Monstrumologist trilogy’s- new series The 5th Wave is well underway. Which is a lot farther along than it was during NYCC when all we knew about it was that it was an alien series with an intriguing if confusing poster. Now we know that it’s about an alien invasion dubbed the Arrival, featuring a main character named Cassie (NICE NAME!) who despite trying to elude the alien scourge and locate her brother has time to maintain her own Tumblr. The first 54 pages of the novel have also been released. We’re already sold.

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